Develop rules that govern code contributions

[Ryan J Ollos]

hasienda has developed an initial draft of some rules governing code contributions. They can be found at License/MandatorySignOff. otaku42 also pointed out that the ​MadWifi project has some text as well.

The purpose of this ticket is to discuss and refine the text, before presenting to the larger community.

[Ryan J Ollos]

The text developed by hasienda sounds good to me. There are a few points where I think we can improve the clarify by refining the text, but I'm definitely in agreement with the overall content the text. The ​certificate of origin on the MadWifi page (and on the link Linux page) also seems to have very good content.

Here are some other ideas I had in mind:

1. #9805 - selection of a license, or inclusion of a user's own license text should be part of the process of creating a TracHack's project.
2. When an account is created, a user must accept licensing agreement such as those outline by hasienda.
3. Include text (or at least links to text) on the ticket page and wiki edit page that clearly describes the implicit waiver (License/MandatorySignOff).

With (1) implemented, all plugins should have a license. With (2) implemented, all committers will have had to accept a license agreement. With (3) implemented, it will be clear to everyone submitting content to the site through tickets and wiki pages what terms their submitted content is subject to.

The ASF has some ​detailed rules that I need to familiarize myself with. That could serve as another example in developing the rules governing TracHacks (and also what not to do in cases that they are overly burdensome).

Related to the change mentioned for the TracHacksPlugin, it would also be useful to tag all plugins by their license and allowing filtering by license on the WikiStart page, or some other convenient location.

[Ryan J Ollos]

I've observed the following in the jQuery repository, which may be of interest. When a new contributor submits a pull request, they are asked to sign the ​CLA (e.g. see ​this ticket).