Not to put too much of a fine point on it, but that license provision strikes me as only half of the deal in the case of a submission to an ASF Project. The other key aspect has to do with the explicit assertion by the pull-requester that they have the right to make the contribution, which is to say that the commit contents not already in the code base are the original (in Copyright sense) work of the submitter and not constrained by a condition of employment, etc. Considering that there are varying degrees of understanding and casualness around this in the world of software developers, additional ceremony (whether involving a CLA or not) seems valuable as part of the ASF preservation of IP provenance by having the contributor be mindful of the assurance they are explicitly claiming in making a contribution.
More complicated is staging for a committer to vet the contribution and determine whether and how to accept it, preserve history, etc. (There is a great Google Talk by Linus on how that is organized for the Linux kernel, with a hierarchy of lieutenants.) That is also a factor around pull requests, although I don't think it came up at Corinthia. I believe ASF approaches for this situation, along with the preservation of history back to the contributor, have only recently (post-Corinthia) been worked up; I haven't followed the details, being on an SVN-harbored project. For Git-harbored ASF projects (as the Corinthia podling was), the ability for committers to simply synchronize a clone is very nice and straightforward under a CTR regime. - Dennis PS: I think I created confusion about accepting DIFs (patches) versus pull requests myself, in a dev@ message very early in the setup for Corinthia (December 2014). That aside on a larger topic was never discussed though. I don't think there was ever a non-committer pull-request to deal with. Later, there was a time when one contributor's submissions became substantial enough to request an iCLA, and that contributor was invited to become a committer+PPMC almost concurrently. I think that happened every time and I don't recall complaint on those occasions. There was expressed concern that ceremonial requirements, process, etc., would discourage participation and that is where ideas about community may have collided. > -----Original Message----- > From: Rob Vesse [mailto:rve...@dotnetrdf.org] > Sent: Monday, January 18, 2016 01:30 > To: general@incubator.apache.org > Subject: Re: Post mortem request for the handling of the Corinthia > podling (was Re: FYI, I have subscribed to this list and to your private > list) > > Just wanted to reply to one specific point: > > On 15/01/2016 14:55, "Peter Kelly" <pmke...@apache.org> wrote: > > >I felt were unreasonable - the inability to accept pull requests from > >anyone without first asking them to sign a CLA > > Who in particular told you this? I occasionally see communities > operating > under this misguided assumption and it frustrates me and I try and > correct > it whenever I see this > > The Apache License contains Clause 5 (Submission of Contributions) which > says the following: > > "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. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or > modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed > with Licensor regarding such Contributions." > > > So basically anything anyone that intentionally submits something to > your > project for inclusion (and it's pretty clear that a pull request is an > intentional submission) then it is fair game for inclusion in an Apache > Licensed project without the need for any separate agreement. > > Now for large contributions (where large is arbitrarily defined by the > accepting community) there may be a desire to always get a CLA but it is > a > fallacy to say that a ICLA is always required. > > As a corollary if someone is making large contributions they should be a > candidate for committer and/or PMC status and if they were to be granted > committer status then the ASF requires they have a ICLA on file > > Rob > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
