Signed Committer’s Agreements No Longer Required

For a long time, Mozilla has required people gaining commit access to our core repos to sign a Committer’s Agreement. This is not a copyright assignment or a transfer of rights; it’s basically a commitment to good behaviour, and to making sure code which gets into the tree is allowed to be there and is correctly licensed.

However, the logistics of printing it out, signing it, scanning/photographing it back in etc. were always a barrier to participation. In consultation with our legal team, we have decided that people simply assenting to the document is just as good so, as of now, people are no longer required to go through the process of signing it.

However, all people with commit access to any Mozilla repository are still expected to abide by it :-) We may be adding CONTRIBUTING files referencing the document to our Github repos to make this point more clear.

6 thoughts on “Signed Committer’s Agreements No Longer Required

  1. What does “assent” mean? Can I just ask in IRC? Does it need to be an e-mail that I log and retain?

    I’m also excited by this change – though maybe not as much as jdm, as I haven’t run into problems with getting it signed in Servo, except with corporate partners.

  2. The commit access process involves a bug; having them say it’s OK in the bug would be more than enough. But the point is not that we have to get them to record their assent; the point is that they need to be happy with it, because we are going to hold them to it. :-)

  3. Thanks for the clarificaiton! I was curious because on Servo, there’s no bugzilla-based process for gaining commit access to our projects. I have traditionally pointed people at the committer form and then once it’s been submitted I twiddle github settings and the autolander’s approver list. I can shift this process to something that tracks it in a GH issue.

  4. Is there also some kind of additional check or anyone asking and promising to do things in good faith will be automatically a commiter?

    In many open source projects I was required to pass some kind of test (which is generally fixing some bugs and submitting patches, having people verify them etc.. and if you have a few that are landed you eventually get comitter for example)

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