Contributions to Lift by non-committers

From the beginning of the Lift project, Lift has had a very well defined and restrictive Intellectual Property (IP) policy. All code in the various Lift repositories was created exclusively by committers who signed an IP assignment agreement (we adopted the Plone IP assignment.) All Lift code was created exclusively by the committers and the copyright in such code was assigned to an entity that holds the Lift copyrights.

The reason for the IP assignment and the rigor was that, 6 years ago, the way the law treated open source was not as clear. It was also very important to demonstrate to corporate adopters of Lift that the use of Lift was free of any potential litigation.

Times have changed:

• The GitHub model of pull requests is prevalent and there have not been legal challenges that I'm aware of.
• Lift is a well accepted, well regarded framework and has not have any material acceptance issues related to Lift's code provenance.

So, as of November 12, 2012, the Lift committers have voted 21-0 to adopt a new contribution acceptance policy.

We will accept pull requests into the Lift codebase if the pull requests meet the following criteria:

• One or more of the following:

  • Documentation including ScalaDoc comments in code
  • Example code
  • Small changes, enhancements, or bug fixes to Lift's code
• Each pull request must include a signature at the bottom of the /contributors.md file.

I look forward to seeing how Lift will continue to grow with the new contribution policy.

David Pollak