This is a question the one of our Mentors should be able to answer:

I have been studying the following ASF documents:

   - Contributor Agreements
   <http://apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html>
   - Roles <http://apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#roles>
   - CLA-FAQ <https://www.apache.org/licenses/cla-faq.html>

The Contributor Agreements page states:

> "The ASF desires that all contributors of ideas, *code*, or documentation
> to any Apache projects complete, sign, and submit via email an Individual
> Contributor License Agreement (ICLA)."  ("desires" is a rather weak word
> here)


The Roles page states:

> A *developer* is a user who contributes to a project in the form of *code*
> or documentation. ...  Developers are also known as *contributors* .

and

> A *committer* is a developer that was given write access to the code
> repository and has a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA)
> <http://www.apache.org/licenses/#clas> on file. ...


This seems to imply that a *developer / contributor* does *not* need to
sign an ICLA in order to contribute *code*, which appears to be in conflict
with what is stated on the Contributor Agreements page.

I also looked on the CLA-FAQ page, hopefully to find answers to what I
consider some of the most obvious questions about ICLAs. I did not find any
of these addressed:

   - Does anyone (and everyone) who submits a PR (even trivial edits)  to a
   project have to have signed an ICLA on record, before we can accept the PR?
   - PRs can be trivial or huge, where do we draw the line (if there is a
   line)?
   - How is this supposed to be managed? Are project committers supposed to
   ask anyone who submits a PR if they have a signed ICLA on record?
   - Is it generally the case that employees of corporations and graduate
   students of universities have to ask permission of their employer or
   university to sign an ICLA?

Cheers,

Lee.

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