[Project-managers] Contribution procedures

[Ted Ralphs]

Hi all,

We have been lax in enforcing our IP and licensing requirements since
moving to Github. In SVN, we had pretty tight control over who could
commit, but it is now possible to accept PRs from people who don't have
write access. Just to remind you, our contribution guidelines are
documented here <https://www.coin-or.org/contributing/code/> and here
<https://projects.coin-or.org/CoinTLC/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/contribproc.pdf?format=raw>
(the
project management guidelines are a little out of date now, with the move
to Github).

The important part is that any significant/substantial contribution should
be accompanied by a signed Contributor's Statement of Respect for Ownership
<https://www.coin-or.org/management/forms/csro.pdf>. To make this process
completely digital and to ease the burden of requesting contributors to
sign such paperwork, we are planning to implement an automated system
similar to that used by many bigger open source projects. Basically, anyone
submitting a PR will automatically be asked to digitally sign a CSRO (this
process will be quick and painless) if they haven't already done so).

The plan at the moment is to use the system developed by SAP and also used
by Microsoft itself, as described here:

https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant

The system has already been implemented for beta testing purposes in PuLP.
It seems to work smoothly and requires just a click to agree after
submitting the first PR.

*I'm planning to activate this for all COIN-OR Github projects within the
next week or so. If you have any concerns, let me know. We will also likely
ask everyone who currently has paperwork on file or who has committed
something recently and does not have paperwork on file to sign the
agreement (again, just one click). Look for more on this later.*

Let me know what you think and if you have any comments or concerns.
Cheers,

Ted
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Professor, Industrial and Systems Engineering
Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted
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