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remove information about CLA #57

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@bacongobbler bacongobbler commented May 7, 2019

From a cursory glance at other Azure projects, they don't necessarily spell out that they need contributors to sign a CLA. That's part of the PR process.

closes #56.

From a cursory glance at other Azure projects, they don't necessarily spell out that they need contributors to sign a CLA; that's part of the PR process.

closes #56.
@purpleidea
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@bacongobbler I think the more appropriate thing to do would be to discontinue the use of the CLA. In my opinion, it only hurts the credibility of the project and the corporate overlords dedication to "open source".

However, if you can't convince your legal department to do so, I strongly urge you to mention this in the README. It's irresponsible to not, since a contributor will want to know before they start writing a patch if they're even allowed to submit one!

So NACK on this PR.

(I'm happy to submit a re-wording PR for you if I don't need a CLA signed to get it merged. LMK)

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Removing the CLA is a no-go. We can change the verbiage in the README however. What would you suggest we change it to?

@bacongobbler
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bacongobbler commented May 7, 2019

(and yes, it'd require a CLA sign-off to merge your PR).

@purpleidea
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We can change the verbiage in the README however. What would you suggest we change it to?

You could change the first paragraph to:

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which gives Microsoft an unlimited license to the copyrights and patents associated with this contribution, and declares that you have the right to do so, and actually do, grant us these rights. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

I kept the same form, but made it accurate. HTH

@purpleidea
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Removing the CLA is a no-go.

As an aside, if Microsoft isn't trying to be sneaking about legal things, there's no honest legal reason why you need to have a CLA for pull requests received via GitHub, since the GitHub TOS includes an explicit inbound=outbound clause. [1] Knowing this, to still require a CLA would (in my opinion) mean that they care more about part two of this well-known quote:

"Free Software is free as in freedom. Open Source is free as in labour."

Push back against unnecessary legal overhead. It only hurts your project, because you lose out on that 20% (or more) of special Pareto contributors that write code to get it right, and without them, it's hard to tell if you're building a code base from 9-5ers that can't wait to clock out :/

Good luck!

[1] See point number 6: https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-terms-of-service

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CLA notice in README is dishonest or misleading
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