With the completion of 2U’s acquisition of edX, stewardship of the Open edX project will transfer to the surviving non-profit organization still led by MIT and Harvard.
There will be a lot more to follow on the new governance structure for the Open edX project, so watch this space.
One change that will occur very soon, however, is that the public repositories that encompass the Open edX platform will be transferred from the edX GitHub organization to the Open edX organization.
The repositories in the Open edX organization will become the canonical upstreams for the project.
In order to ensure seamless ongoing contribution it is essential that you sign and return a new version of the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). If you are an existing individual or entity contributor, you should have received a new CLA for digital signature.
If you have not received one, you can download the individual CLA and the entity CLA to review the new documents. Also, please reach out to oscm@axim.org to let us know that you didn’t receive a signable copy in email.
A new CLA is necessary because the existing one is constrained to the edX GitHub organization, and does not cover contributions to the Open edX organization.
The new CLA has also been updated to be more in-line with open-source norms and standards.
It is very important to review and sign the new CLA because we won’t be able to accept contributions from you or your company until that has been done.
Please ensure that you have done so by Wednesday, November 24th.
We expect the actual transfer to occur as soon as November 25th.
Technical Tidbits
When the repositories are moved, anything referencing them today will continue to work because GitHub will redirect both read and write operations.
However, over time, everyone should update their configuration to point directly to the canonical upstreams. That can be done fairly easily with a command like the following:
$ git remote set-url origin new_url
Your forks — if you have any — will remain associated with repositories after they have moved.
For the curious, you can find GitHub’s documentation on repository transfers here.
