Click-Through Committer’s Agreement: Help Wanted

Mozilla requires that everyone directly contributing code to us signs a Committer’s Agreement. We have made this process easier in recent years (the most recent update was allowing people to take a digital camera shot of a signed agreement and email it in; useful if you don’t have a scanner) but it’s still more of a speedbump than we would like.

Our legal team have agreed in principle that we can have a click-through Committer’s Agreement, if it’s designed a certain way. The idea would be that a user would identify themselves as owning the email address they are going to be using, be presented with the agreement (on the page, not as a link) and click “I Agree”. This fact of agreement would be logged and stored somewhere safe. One can imagine leveraging something like Bugzilla to do the identification (because if you have a Bugzilla account, Bugzilla has already done email challenge-response with you), or building a standalone web app.

All we need now is someone to implement it, in consultation with our lawyers. Any volunteers? :-)

5 thoughts on “Click-Through Committer’s Agreement: Help Wanted

  1. This is great news! I’m sure it would ease the way into the community for a lot of people. Thanks a lot for pursuing this, Gerv.

  2. By ‘directly contributing’ I presume you mean ‘committing’ and not ‘contributing to a project but ultimately having someone else commit it’, yes? The answer seems obvious but still seems worth clarifying.

  3. @Danny: Indeed it is worth clarifying, since I had understood the opposite of what you did: I thought someone writing a fix to a bug, marking it “checkin-needed”, and having someone else commit said fix, would also be a “contributor” in the sense meant by Gerv.

  4. Depends on what language you want it written in…

    If you want to, drop me more info to the email on this comment – you might have a volunteer :-)

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