announcements

Scaling Our Open Source Projects: Implementing a Contributor License Agreement

Developers contributing to Auth0 and Okta projects are provided with a simple way to complete our industry-standard agreement in just a few clicks

Ryan Cobb

Director, IP Counsel

Jun 15, 2022 • 3 min read

We’re going to soon be implementing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA for short) on our open source projects to allow us to continue providing as many open source offerings as we can.

What’s a CLA, you may be asking? Well, in short, it provides licenses to us and the rest of the community to use the Intellectual Property (IP) you create when you contribute to one or more of our open source projects. But more on the nuts and bolts of that later…

Why are we doing a CLA now? As we grow, we increasingly see a need to protect our open-source projects at Auth0 and Okta so that we can freely accept contributions and our projects can grow. Additionally, the CLA process at Okta was cumbersome, and we wanted to relax that, so we decided to use CLA Assistant to streamline the signing process for our fantastic community of contributors.

To create our CLA, we looked around the industry and based our CLA on similar language found in those from the Apache Foundation, .NET Foundation, CNCF, Google, the Eclipse Foundation, and Salesforce, to name a few. You can check out the text of our CLA here. If you’ve signed a CLA with Okta in the past, we’re going to ask you to sign a new one via the CLA Assistant (don’t worry… you don’t need to print anything out… you just sign right in Github!). This way, we have all the agreements in the same place and organized by your Github handle. It’s just a few clicks!

If you want to contribute to one or more of our Open Source projects, what it means to you is:

  • License grant - you grant a copyright and patent license to your contribution so that others using the open-source project can use it without fear of infringement issues.
  • We ask that you represent that the contributions are yours to be made, and you can grant the associated rights to those contributions.
  • We don’t expect you to provide any support for your work unless you want to.
  • The agreement is retroactive to cover your past contributions to ensure we have the most up-to-date protections.
  • Suppose you’ve made contributions in the past but don’t want to sign our CLA, no problem. You don’t need to sign it for any of your past work. But, if you want to make contributions from now on, we will ask you to sign the CLA so that we can make sure we continue offering our best to the community.

We hope these changes will make the experience of contributing to our Open Source projects better, more straightforward, and safer for everyone. If you have any questions or concerns on this, please reach out to our developer forum, where we will do our best to get you the answers and address your needs. Thank you for your past and future contributions! We appreciate them and look forward to continuing building together!

About Auth0

Auth0 by Okta takes a modern approach to customer identity and enables organizations to provide secure access to any application, for any user. Auth0 is a highly customizable platform that is as simple as development teams want, and as flexible as they need. Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 delivers convenience, privacy, and security so customers can focus on innovation. For more information, visit https://auth0.com.