[hibernate-dev] Contributions - changes "CLA" process

Steve Ebersole steve at hibernate.org
Mon Aug 7 17:27:28 EDT 2017


Currently we have had to rely on a less-than-ideal CLA approach as part of
the process for accepting a contribution.  That CLA app is a hassle for
contributors and it is a head-ache for the folks who manage them.  So in an
effort to stream-line this process, we will be making the following changes
to this process:

   1. We will no longer be using that CLA app.
   2. CONTRIBUTING.MD will be updated to indicate that developers
   implicitly agree to contributing their contributions under the terms of the
   pertinent license (LGPL generally).  Some documentation and some website
   pages refer to the CLA process and will be updated to point to the
   CONTRIBUTING.MD file directly.
   3. Did I say we would no longer be using the CLA app? ;)

The end result is that when we process contributions (whether PR, patch
attached to Jira, etc) we no longer need to ask the contributor to sign the
CLA - such approval is implicitly given.

Note that this is not really even a change.  The proposed process is the
general understanding of contributions to any project in terms of agreement
with the terms of that project's license.  The point of the CLA was never
really acceptance of the terms of the license anyway.  It was more
identifying contributors of pieces of code in case we ever want to
re-license.

This all came from a discussion with the Red Hat legal team, so I feel
extremely confident this is a good change and a sound one.

I will only be making said changes to the ORM repo.  I leave it up to the
non-ORM team whether they want to change the non-ORM repos to follow these
guidelines as well.


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