We manage several open source projects at Pivotal, including Spring, Concourse and Greenplum Database. For anything other than obvious fixes, we ask contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). This page describes why we have a CLA, provides responses to some commonly asked questions about CLAs, and provides some instructions about how to complete the CLA process.
A CLA is a legal document between a contributor and an open source project steward. Our CLA is based on the Apache Software Foundation’s CLA and in it, contributors state that the contributions are their original work and grant Pivotal a copyright and patent license to include their contributions in the project. In return, Pivotal and the open source communities we serve are able to distribute and build upon such contributions. This means that if any legal issues arise in the future about our rights to distribute the code, we can show them these forms. It also ensures that the contributors cannot withdraw permission to the contributions at some point in the future.
Both individuals and large enterprises use code from our open source projects, and in our experience, they need to be sure about the origins and rights to use the code. CLAs therefore encourage broad participation from the community while minimizing risks to Pivotal and our end-users resulting from insufficiently-licensed contributions coming into Pivotal’s open source projects.
In all cases, contributors retain full ownership rights to their contributions and can use them however they want.
No. In certain cases described below, Pivotal may accept very minor contributions without requiring a CLA. This is designed for contributions that are minor enough (e.g. spelling errors, grammar mistakes, typos, formatting mistakes, etc.) to not be considered by you to be intellectual property that is independently protectable (an “Obvious Fix”). The purpose of this exception is to lower the barrier for new contributors to make helpful and necessary contributions to Pivotal projects while retaining the integrity of the project and our community.
We rely on your judgment to determine what is “obvious”; if you’re not sure, please ask the project owners or email cla@pivotal.io We generally consider Obvious Fixes to be changes that do not introduce any new functionality or creativity, for example:
On the contrary, here are some contributions that would require a signed CLA before pull requests can be submitted/accepted:
If your contribution is an Obvious Fix, please mention the CLA bot in a comment or the PR body message like this: “@pivotal-cla This is an Obvious Fix”. This case-insensitive sentence can appear anywhere in the comment, as long as it starts with the mention of the bot.
Government employee work (and that of its direct contractors) is born into the public domain of the United States. Section 4 of our CLA provides an exception from the usual assertion of legal entitlement to grant a license when the work is by a government employee.
If you are a government employee, please sign the CLA and add “public domain” to the pull request description.
If you already signed a Contributor License Agreement, then your data has been imported into the new tooling in order to provide automatic integration with GitHub. If your signature did not include your GitHub username, then you will need to perform a few steps to link your GitHub account to your signature.
Note: If you do not want to follow these steps, you can always sign the Contributor License Agreement again.
No. A corporate signature is either associated to the domain of a verified email address or a GitHub organization.
If your company signed the agreement based upon an email domain, then you will need to perform a few steps to link your GitHub account to your signature. This flow is only for legacy signatures.
If your company associated the signature to a GitHub organization, then you must ensure the following is true.
If the status of a Pull Request did not update:
If you’re ready to sign the CLA, please visit the Contributor License Agreement to see the options for individuals and companies.