Policy for Contributor Agreements and Patches

Short version: patch submitters must sign the Plone Contributor Agreement before their patches can be merged.

Plone's core codebase is owned by the Plone Foundation, and all of our core contributors sign the Plone Contributor Agreement to assign copyright in their contributions to the Plone Foundation. This establishes a clean legal trail for the Plone codebase, which is important for many customers, and allows the Plone Foundation to effectively protect the integrity of Plone's intellectual property
assets.

We welcome patch submissions through our issue tracker, but in order to ensure that copyright on submitted code is legally transferred to the Plone Foundation, all contributors to the core Plone codebase must sign a Contributor Agreement before their contributions can be merged into the Plone revision control repository.

Plone contributors must NOT simply check in patches written by persons who have not signed the Contributor Agreement. Instead, submitted patches should be considered as detailed bug reports. As with any bug report, changes proposed in the report are to be subjected to the analysis and judgement of the person responding to the report, and any code merged into the Plone codebase is expected to be the work and responsibility of the person applying the change.

The Plone Release Manager may choose not to require a Contributor Agreement for patches which are so minor that they do not constitute a copyrightable "creative work."  Typically, this will only apply to minor fixes such as:

• Correcting typographic errors such as incorrect identifiers, operators, punctuation or white space;
• Missing or updated "import" statements;
• Renaming existing routines;
• Changes required by changes in other modules that introduce no new logic.

If you have questions about the applicability of this policy to your particular circumstances, please contact the Plone Foundation board of directors at board@plone.org.