Re: Discussion About Community Contributions to NetBeans

I would agree with Daniel and Tom. These agreements are very dated in the electronic era. We should be using an electronic document like a pdf which can be signed.

John

On Oct 20, 2011, at 12:39 PM, Tom Wheeler wrote:

> I am not a lawyer and do not work for Oracle, but I certainly do agree
> that requiring paper copies (or electronic copies of paper copies) of
> contributor agreements seems complicated and dated, and that this is
> an area that could definitely be improved.
> 
> I would suggest that the people in charge of the CA process consider
> whether the "Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce"
> enacted as federal law in the US makes submitting CAs on paper
> unnecessary:
> 
>   http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/usc_sup_01_15_10_96.html
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Daniel Bell <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi All,
>> Please note: no criticism is intended here: just an idea for improvement.
>> Having just signed/submitted a CA, I feel that this is an area that could be
>> improved to lower the bar for potential contributors to NetBeans. I'm not
>> sure if I'm the only one who doesn't own a scanner, but that turned out to
>> be a significant hurdle for me submitting the CA: I had to print and post
>> the PDF. I know that CA's are important, particularly for companies/projects
>> as large as Oracle/NetBeans, so I would never suggest removing them.
>> However, I wonder if the process could be made easier (potentially for all
>> concerned) by adopting an online CA submission system, such as Google has
>> for individual contributors
>> (http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html). As far as I know,
>> corporate CLAs for Google still need to be signed and faxed though.
>> Cheers,
>> Daniel
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Tom Wheeler
> http://www.tomwheeler.com/