According to the ASF there is no legal issue with the status of the contribution provided by a contributor without an ICLA.
In the license [1] it is stated that: Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Furthermore, in LEGAL-156 it is stated that PRs of non-privileged contributors can be accepted, see [2] Even one of the founders of the ASF has stated (see [3]): that opinion comes from me speaking as a board member and author of the Apache License, and has previously been cleared with Apache's legal team for a long ago discussion with Incubator. We don't need a CLA on file to accept contributions from non-committers. We just need a clear intent by the author to contribute under our normal terms. Though we desire our non-privileged contributors to submit an ICLA, it is not a requirement (see [4]). When we started the discussion on that subject the intent was: 1. enable non-privileged contributors to express that they were willing to do more, and 2. for the project to be able to recognise those contributors more easy, and facilitate the onboarding process [1] https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-156?focusedCommentId=13554864&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-13554864 [3] https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-infrastructure-dev/201112.mbox/%3ca603ffce-623b-43e9-87f8-39baa51c7...@gbiv.com%3E [4] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Apache+OFBiz+Contributors Best regards, Pierre Smits *Apache Trafodion <https://trafodion.apache.org>, Vice President* *Apache Directory <https://directory.apache.org>, PMC Member* Apache Incubator <https://incubator.apache.org>, committer *Apache OFBiz <https://ofbiz.apache.org>, contributor (without privileges) since 2008* Apache Steve <https://steve.apache.org>, committer On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 9:44 AM Nicolas Malin <nicolas.ma...@nereide.fr> wrote: > Hello > > On 29/01/2020 07:58, Michael Brohl wrote: > > > > Not sure if we necessarily have to deprecate the patch based > > contributions. It could be a simpler way for contributors to provide a > > change, especially if they are not developers and/or familiar with the > > pull request mechanisms. Maybe the patch based way becomes obsolete > > naturally but I would not force it. > > > > We should work out a simple, documented way how to do it with PR's and > > encourage contributors to use it, including using proper commit > > statements following our template to prevent doing correctional work > > on the committers site. > > I have no strong opinion for path or PR, all seem good for me. But for > PR if the author is the contributer and not the commiter, I have a doubt > about the legal status and the ICLA [1]. > > > The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms > under which intellectual property > > has been contributed to the ASF and thereby allow us to defend the > project should there be a > > legal dispute regarding the software at some future time. A signed > ICLA is required to be on file > > before an individual is given commit rights to any ASF project. > > Personally I have a preference to cherry-pick all commits and squash > them and unique commit with proper commit message > > Nicolas > > [1] http://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html#clas > >
