CLAHub is a small side project I cooked up a few months ago, and just got around to open-sourcing. The goal is to remove the friction of Contributor License Agreements for contributors and maintainers alike. It’s not done yet, but I’m curious to hear what people think.
What is it?
The general idea with CLAs is this: contributors grant the maintainer a license to distribute the their code, and state that they’re legally able to do so. A fair number of projects have a CLA in place, including jQuery, Node.js, Django, and Chef. In the best cases the CLA is signed via electronic signature, like Node.js does with a Google Form. In the worst cases you have to print, sign, and fax the agreement. In all cases, maintainers are responsible for cross-referencing contributions and signatures to make sure all contributions have a corresponding signature.
With CLAHub and an open source project on GitHub you can:
- Sign in with GitHub and create a CLA for your project.
- Ask contributors to sign in with GitHub to electronically sign the CLA.
- See on each pull request whether the contributors have all signed your CLA. This uses the handy Commit Status API, similar to what CI tools do.
Here’s the app. There’s a little slideshow on the frontpage to see how it works. And here’s the source on GitHub.
Learn more about CLAs
Here’s some more background on CLAs:
- Contributor License Agreements by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
- A CLA By Any Other Name on Groklaw.
Want to choose a CLA? Project Harmony is a web tool that helps you quickly select a CLA.
Feedback
There’s more that needs to be done, but the core of the app works. The next steps are in GitHub issues.
Do you use a CLA for your project(s)? Would this encourage you to add a CLA if you don’t have one already? (That’s not really my goal – just to reduce friction where CLAs are already valuable.) If you have a CLA, would you use something like this to reduce the barrier to entry and your overhead? What kinds of features would be useful?