I’m all for having a consistent template but the legal disclaimer is something I personally dislike and will discourage contributions. My understanding is that ICLA is not required for every single contributor. I don’t think we ask anybody to sign it unless they’re a committer. Under the Apache license even emails to the dev or user list, jira comments, slack comments are considered “contributions”. We don’t have disclaimers or acknowledgment each time a contributor emails the dev list. I would strongly encourage that we point new contributors to the getting started page which should cover these details. They need to go through it once and not with each and every PR. Alternatively we could have a GitHub bot that identifies a new contributor and asks them to accept CoC, License agreement, etc for their first PR only.
> > On Aug 18, 2022, at 1:01 AM, Mick Semb Wever <m...@apache.org> wrote: > > > > >> On Thu, 18 Aug 2022 at 08:10, Benedict <benedictatapa...@icloud.com> wrote: >> > By submitting this pull request, I acknowledge that I am making a >> > contribution to the Apache Software Foundation under the terms and >> > conditions of the [Contributor's >> > Agreement](https://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html). >> >> Do we expect every contributor who makes any contribution to agree to this? >> If we don’t, does it imply anything weird to start stipulating this for PRs >> only? Might be worth running past legal, as we don’t expect ICLAs to be >> signed for many contributions today, nor any specific assignment besides the >> notice at the top of any files in the contribution. >> I’m also not convinced we should be doing much more than letting the user >> know they should have read and followed the style guide and contribution >> guide, and that before being merged a commit should include documentation >> and test changes - but these aren’t probably blockers for an initial review, >> and might discourage contributions by making the initial hurdles appear >> higher. > > > It is accurate Benedict. There's past conversations at the foundation level > (+legal) about whether this agreement needed to be made explicitly (at the > time integration with github was being accepted). The verdict was that it > does not need to be explicit when contributing to existing files, because > those files are already copyright to the ASF and the contributor is not > requesting any change to that. > > When a contribution adds new files we move towards requiring them to sign a > (i)CLA. > But even, for simple contributions, this can be tackled implicitly, if fixing > any rat errors is on them. If the contributor puts the license header onto > the new files, the license includes reference to the copyright owner (being > the ASF). > > I see no harm in providing this information. With a preference as it is just > as information (not a checkbox). It's a soft opinion, but I suspect the > majority of PRs will be from folk that know all this already and the > checkboxes will be ignored. >
