A plea for github to fix the CLA signing issue on the user side

gistfile1.txt

Here is a support letter I have just sent to github [2019-02-22]:

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Hi,

I contacted you some 6 months ago and it doesn't look like this is of a
priority, but it's of a huge priority to tens of thousands of projects that now
require PR submitters to sign CLA before their PR can be accepted.

You probably don't realize that if I looked at the PR changes and the user then
refused to sign the CLA, according to the copyright laws I can't do the same
change myself even if I were going to do it myself anyway. Especially in
ridiculous cases of someone submitting a one letter typo fix and then refusing
to sign a CLA. Please stop the madness. Do not let users submit PRs if the
project requires a CLA until they signed it.

And I'm not even talking about us needing to tell users that we can't accept
their PR until they sign the CLA. Again, again and again. And meanwhile we
wasted time looking at the PR and we can't accept it, and some submitters
disappear for weeks. This just sucks.

It surely isn't a super complicated logic to add to your workflow to sort it out
on the user-side before handing it off to the project developers.

At this moment you have thousands of PRs putting open source developers in
potentially compromising situations (copyright-wise), and you have thousands of
open source developers wasting their time asking users to sign CLAs. Imagine the
positive impact you'd make on lives of so many people by making this simple
change.

Thank you.

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I sent a similar letter some months back, and received a staple answer, thanks
we will consider it. And nothing has changed.

I believe, if each of you who maintains a github project, that requires CLA, were
to submit such request perhaps they would have done something about it.