Acciente Contributor License Agreement (CLA) Submission

This repository hosts the Acciente CLAs for download, and also serves to verify ownership of the GitHub username specified on the CLA submission.

Individual CLA Submission Instructions

The three-step process below ensures that your personal information and signature on the CLA is not published publicly on GitHub.

Step 1: Complete and email the CLA to Acciente

• download the latest version of the Acciente Individual Contributor License Agreement (PDF)

• complete your information on the CLA and sign it

• email the completed and signed CLA to cla-admin [at] acciente.com

Step 2: Wait for a verification email from Acciente

• after your CLA is successfully reviewed, you will receive an email with a verification file attached

Step 3: Submit a pull request with the verification file

• fork the acciente-cla repository in GitHub

• place the verification file from step 2 into the /verified-cla-accounts folder and submit a pull request
  Note: do not place the CLA from step 1 with your personal information into the folder!

• if the verification file in your pull request validates correctly, the pull request will be merged

• congratulations, you now are a contributor!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What's a CLA?
   To summarize contributoragreements.org, a contributor license agreement (CLA) is an agreement between an open source project and contributors to the project, "to avoid, as far as possible, any future legal issues regarding the individual contributions, such as disputes over origin of ownership or respective rights.""

2. Will Acciente publish the personal information I submitted in the CLA?
   No, your personal information from the CLA is for internal use only. This is the reason we ask you to submit it privately via email, and not publicly on GitHub.

3. What's the point of this elaborate 3-step process?
   In the US, "[copyright] assignment must be signed and in writing, as must exclusive licenses that give the right to grant sub-licenses. [...] Technical signatures are accepted in order to fulfill signature formalities. Acts lacking formalities are completely void" (Guadamuz and Rens 2013.)
   So when Acciente receives a pull request for a code submission via GitHub, we need to collect some personal information and a signature from the contributor agreeing to our CLA, before we can merge the pull request and include it into our distribution. We don't want a contributor's personal information and signature published publicly, so we ask for it to be submitted privately via email (step 1). To ensure that this email was sent by the same person that controls the contributor's GitHub account, we then reply to that email (step 2) with a verification file that the contributor needs to submit via the same GitHub account as the original code contribution (step 3).
   TL;DR: Given existing US copyright and licensing laws, this process protects Acciente and users of its open source projects, and keeps a contributor's personal information private.

4. How soon will a CLA be accepted?
   There are two steps in the process that require manual review to ensure you filled out the CLA and pushed the correct verification file. We expect the turnaround time to be no more than a couple of days.