New, more lightweight process for signing contribution agreements for Liferay Portal

Matija Šuklje
Matija Šuklje
A Minute Read

At Liferay we take our Open Source roots seriously and are increasing our commitment to the movement.

When we look at how people can contribute to Liferay Portal, one of the bigger hurdles was that our contribution process is quite complex – including having to create a JIRA ticket and through that sign our Liferay Portal Contributor’s Agreement. That required setting up an account on our internal JIRA even if for simple contributions.

Today we are announcing that we have gotten rid of the JIRA step(s) and simplified contribution by replacing it with a CLA assistant integrated into GitHub.

Which means that now you do not need to create a new account or leave GitHub to sign it. In addition, now you only need to sign it once, when you first contribute to that repository, and that signature will be bound to your GitHub

Unfortunately, this means those contributors who already signed via JIRA in the past will have to sign again, and I do apologise to all affected. Fortunately, this will be just a one time task (as opposed to the JIRA process before).

Of course, we do not intend to stop here, and this is just a first step towards a more streamlined and enjoyable contribution experience! Stay tuned for more in the future …

Details

The text of the Liferay Portal Contributor’s Agreement stays the same, we just transformed it to MarkDown for better integration.

On the software side, after comparing several options we chose CLA Assistant, which is developed and hosted by SAP as Open Source software. Just in case we are making regular backups of the list of signatures.

The initiative for this move was done in collaboration between our Developer Relations and Legal teams. I would particularly like to extend kudos to Milen Dyankov, for kick-starting this discussion.

Page Comments
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Piotr Paradiuk
5 Years Ago - Edited

I'm glad you're taking steps towards a real open source collaboration. I hope you keep pushing in this direction, although I can still see challenges that are ahead to having actually good contribution process in place where it's useful for Liferay source and helps improve functionalities that have flaws which can be easily enhanced by the community. 

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Fredi B
5 Years Ago - Edited

Sorry to say but Liferay is far, far away from "take Open Source roots seriously".

 

A main principle of  open source is to have "documentation freely available to the public". You will have a hard time searching for really good, free available Liferay documentation.

Some breadcrumbs here, some breadcrumbs there and you need to always hope for the help of the competent people in the forums.

 

This needs to be taken definitely more "seriously".

 

 

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Olaf Kock Fredi B
5 Years Ago

Hi Fredi,

There are several layers on which to comment on your post - first of all: If that's your perception, then it's valid - because obviously your expectation has not been met. And while I don't want to go into an argument about validity or correctness of the assumptions, or completeness of the available information: With this statement here, others will read it and might assume that your opinion is fact.

Currently, there's a lot of documentation available on help.liferay.com and learn.liferay.com. (I'm saying "currently" as I don't know where more official documentation will have popped up when someone is reading this comment in the future). Also here, on the community site in the forums, on slack, community blogs, on Liferay university and on various external blogs that publish specific information and tipps. (and more - I'm not trying to be exhaustive here)

There's a whole team paid to document more and more features. Just the salary of the documentation team by far exceeds the revenue from the Open Source licenses (0 €). And that's not even mentioning the developers' salaries.

Naturally, documentation for the latest version might lag behind the feature implementation. The alternative would be to hold back the releases until documentation has been written.

Writing documentation always targets a specific audience - ideally that's me (on my specific level of knowledge), but I'd also be happy if it was you (on your level). But sometimes it's somebody else - who might be neither on my nor on your level of experience. They might be happy about that piece of documentation, or it might go over their head.

I've just had a conversation with Bryan, Liferay's CEO, to be edited and published on Radio Liferay soon - in it we cover Open Source being at the heart of Liferay as well. And for me, that goes back 12 years with an unbroken promise (https://www.olafkock.de/ok/2008/09/26/making_money_with_opensource_software.html)

I won't even be going into arguments over what makes up taking Open Source seriously. But anything that you're not happy with is easy to fix with the right contributions. Matija describes that this now is a lot easier than before.

That being said: More free documentation will be available during /dev/24. You've been heard, no matter if I agree with you or not, or to what extent.

 

 

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