Should we adopt a contributor license agreement for our small project?

[AubreyGR]

I’m trying to decide if our small project should adopt a Contributor License Agreement. We’ve had a few outside patches submitted, and I’m unsure if the added overhead is worth the legal protection for future contributions.

[Mia_T]

We had a few patches from outside and I started wondering if a CLA is worth it. The overhead is real even if you keep a boilerplate form short. We didn’t implement one, and patches kept coming, but I worry about a future problem we can’t see yet.

[Jonathan_M]

In a different project we did require a CLA and it did slow down a few first-time contributors. A couple of submitters dropped off or found a way around it, and we spent time chasing signatures. It started feeling like a bottleneck more than protection.

[NoahLS]

I keep thinking the real problem might be review speed, test coverage, or clarity of contribution guidelines. CLA feels like a bandaid for something else. Is this really addressing the core issue, or just adding friction?

[Daniel.R]

If you want to experiment, try a tiny path like a Developer Certificate of Origin or a short one-paragraph CLA, and only require it for non-trivial patches or external forks. You can also require sign-off in commits instead of a full form and see how it changes submission flow.