Add information on legal requirements need for contributions

opengeos / HyperCoast

A Python Package for Visualizing and Analyzing Hyperspectral Data in Coastal Environments

https://hypercoast.org

MIT License

142 stars 24 forks source link

Add information on legal requirements need for contributions #110

Closed platipodium closed 1 month ago

platipodium commented 1 month ago

Description

As part of the review for JOSS at https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/7025 we are asked whether the community information is complete.

The project gives useful and elaborate information on How to Contribute in its contributing.md file as part of the documentation and source.

Missing information

The legal aspects of a third-party contributions are missing. Do you need copyright transfer? Do you have a contributor license agreement? This is as of yet a much neglected (but legally required) aspect of Open Source collaborative development, please add statements to guide your potential contributors to clarify the copyright of their contributions to your project.

You may have a look at the Harmony Agreements for more explanations and potential solutions. See https://www.harmonyagreements.org

giswqs commented 1 month ago

Thank you for the suggestion. Do you have recommendations for sample repositories that use Harmony Agreements?

giswqs commented 1 month ago

What do you think about this Contributor License Agreement (CLA) assistant? https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant https://contributoragreements.org/ca-cla-chooser

platipodium commented 1 month ago

https://contributoragreements.org/ seems also useful, though I have not used it yet for production. It seems to be very much in line with what harmony agreements suggest. What it adds is the link to institutional license policies (if they are publicly accessible)

platipodium commented 1 month ago

Do you have recommendations for sample repositories that use Harmony Agreements?

Actually I don't. In our latest repo we have the individual CLA built from the Harmony Agreements https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/mussel/netlogo-northsea-species/-/blob/main/doc/contributing/contributing-license.md, but we have not yet had to apply it, as the contribution legal issues with the current contributor team in this (and other research projects I run) are dealt with by separate inter-institutional memoranda.

giswqs commented 1 month ago

@platipodium Can you take a look at #111 to see if it address your comments?

platipodium commented 1 month ago

OK, great, that certainly addresses the individual CLA.

How would you deal with entity CLAs?
Have you tested the CLA GitHub workflow?

platipodium commented 1 month ago

Also link the CLA in your contributing.md

giswqs commented 1 month ago

The entity CLA has been added and the links to the CLAs have been added to contributing.md.

The CLA GitHub workflow will be tested once this PR has been merged. Will fix it if it is not working properly.

giswqs commented 1 month ago

I installed CLA assistant to the repo through https://cla-assistant.io. You can see from my pull request that the CLA assistant is working properly now. https://github.com/opengeos/HyperCoast/pull/112#issuecomment-2282898038

giswqs commented 1 month ago

Here is a screenshot showing that I have signed the CLA. New contributors will be promoted to signed the CLA on the pull request.