[Python-Dev] Introducing Electronic Contributor Agreements (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Mar 5 00:23:46 CET 2013

On 3/4/2013 3:46 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

On Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:46:48 -0500 Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

On 3/4/2013 11:36 AM, Brett Cannon wrote:

With this in place I would like to propose that all patches submitted to bugs.python.org <http://bugs.python.org> must come from someone who has signed the CLA before we consider committing it (if you want to be truly paranoid we could say that we won't even look at the code w/o a CLA).

While I regard CLAs as partly being a form of legal theater, I regard our participation as necessary, both to make explicit to contributors what should be implicit in the act of submission and to show to copyright holders a good-faith effort to not improperly incorporate their code.

Note: no one expected the Linux copyright challenge, nor our European trademark challenge, but they happened. I expect there will be more challenges to open source projects, perhaps some legitimate as the number of contributors increases.

Either policy could be facilitated by tracker changes. In order to see the file upload box, one must login and the tracker knows who has a CLA on file (as indicated by a * suffix on the name). If a file is uploaded by someone without, a box could popup with the link to the e-form and a message that a CLA is required. And how about people who upload something else than a patch?

Limit the popup to files with .diff or .patch extension. Reviewers can check for '*' for the occasionally patch lacking that.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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