Proposal: Use and Require CLA for QA Devel Project Contributions

[Tim Flink]

On Tue, 20 May 2014 10:13:09 -0600
Tim Flink <tflink at redhat.com> wrote:

> Any thoughts on whether this is a good idea or a bad idea? Any changes
> to the concept before I look for some specific verbiage and talk to
> legal about it?

After reading a bunch more stuff on CLAs in open source, project
harmony and actually reading the generated CLA, I'm un-proposing the
CLA idea.

In terms of useful things for us, a CLA wouldn't do much, it adds a lot
of complexity and is rather anti-community. I can't justify jumping
through all those hoops for little benefit outside of warm
legal-fuzzies that may not even exist.

That being said, the kernel-style DCO [1] might be worth considering.
Nothing fancy, just documentation that lists the DCO and says that by
contributing code, you agree to its terms. I'm not sure we need to deal
with signing off on code since we don't have a complicated merge
process, though.

This is almost no barrier to entry and reduces the possibility for
folks to be confused about which license they're contributing under.
Overall, I figure it covers most of the use cases we're interested in
(other than possibly reverting back to an older license, which isn't a
big deal) without causing un-needed problems.

Thoughts?

Tim

[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.commits.head/33254
[2] http://developercertificate.org/
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