Contributor License Agreement

First, if you are contributing on behalf of your employer, ensure you have signed a contributor license agreement. Then follow these steps for contributing to Lisp-Stat:

• Step 1: Get source code.
• Step 2: Get approval and modify the source code.
• Step 3: Get your code reviewed and committed to the project.

You may also be interested in the additional information at the end of this document.

Contributor License Agreement

Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) are common and accepted in open source projects. We all wish for Lisp-Stat to be used and distributed as widely as possible, and for its users to be confident about the origins and continuing existence of the code. The CLA help us achieve that goal. Although common, many in the Lisp community are unaware of CLAs or their importance.

Some often asked questions include:

Why do you need a CLA?

We need a CLA because, by law, all rights reside with the originator of a work unless otherwise agreed. The CLA allows the project to accept and distribute your contributions. Without your consent via a CLA, the project has no rights to use the code. Here’s what Google has to say in their CLA policy page:

Standard inbound license

Using one standard inbound license that grants the receiving company broad permission to use contributed code in products is beneficial to the company and downstream users alike.

Technology companies will naturally want to make productive use of any code made available to them. However, if all of the code being received by a company was subject to various inbound licenses with conflicting terms, the process for authorizing the use of the code would be cumbersome because of the need for constant checks for compliance with the various licenses. Whenever contributed code were to be used, the particular license terms for every single file would need to be reviewed to ascertain whether the application would be permitted under the terms of that code’s specific license. This would require considerable human resources and would slow down the engineers trying to utilize the code.

The benefits that a company receives under a standard inbound license pass to downstream users as well. Explicit patent permissions and disclaimers of obligations and warranties clarify the recipients’ rights and duties. The broad grant of rights provides code recipients opportunities to make productive use of the software. Adherence to a single standard license promotes consistency and common understanding for all parties involved.

How do I sign?

In order to be legally binding a certain amount of legal ceremony must take place. This varies by jurisdiction. As an individual ‘clickwrap’ or ‘browser wrap’ agreements are used. For corporations, a ‘wet signature’ is required because it is valid everywhere and avoids ambiguity of assent.

If you are an individual contributor, making a pull request from a personal account, the cla-assistant will automatically prompt you to digitally sign as part of the PR.

What does it do?

The CLA essentially does three things. It ensures that the contributor agrees:

1. To allow the project to use the source code and redistribute it
2. The contribution is theirs to give, e.g. does not belong to their employer or someone else
3. Does not contain any patented ‘stuff’.

Mechanics of the CLA

The Lisp-Stat project uses CLAs to accept regular contributions from individuals and corporations, and to accept larger grants of existing software products, for example if you wished to contribute a large XLISP-STAT library.

Contributions to this project must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. You (or your employer) retain the copyright to your contribution; this simply gives us permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project.

You generally only need to submit a CLA once, so if you have already submitted one (even if it was for a different project), you do not need to do it again.