May 2014 - legal-discuss - lists.openstack.org

Licensing of documentation
by Richard Fontana 16 Mar '15

16 Mar '15

Hi, Certain manuals available at docs.openstack.org contain this legal notice: Copyright © 2013 OpenStack Foundation Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. followed immdiately by a box that says: Except where otherwise noted, this document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode This github repository suggests at quickest glance that Apache License 2.0 is the license: https://github.com/openstack/openstack-manuals Some docs writers at Red Hat were previously under the impression that CC BY was the license of OpenStack documentation, which I assume is incorrect except for material specifically on wiki.openstack.org. Can anyone clarify? We'd like to adapt some portions of the upstream documentation in our product documentation and we want to make sure we get the licensing right. Thanks! Richard Fontana Legal Red Hat, Inc.

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Copyright statements in source
by Rich Bowen 12 Jun '14

12 Jun '14

Stefano suggested that I bring this to the legal-discuss list. I know that this has been discussed in the past, so I don't anticipate a great shift in sentiment, but it seemed worth discussing. My full thoughts are on my blog - http://drbacchus.com/copyright-statements-in-source-files - and I know some of you have seen this discussed on the docs mailing list, or seen it on planet.openstack Anyways, it has been my experience in Open Source communities that having a copyright statement at the top of a source file can be very off-putting to people who want to contribute to that file, due to the perception that it is "owned" by someone in particular. The statement is not necessary: copyright law ensures that contributors have copyright on the content that they author, and git keeps a permanent record of who contributed what. Some folks have claimed (the last time this came up on this list) that the statement was necessary, and this is not the case. It's also unscalable - think in terms of 10 years from now when every file potentially lists hundreds of copyright holders - or perhaps only those who saw fit to add their name to the growing list. What would this contribute? And if people are contributing solely for recognition - which seems at least part of the motivation for a copyright statement, perhaps 1) they're missing the point of Open Source and 2) we should provide a more public means of thanking the enormous list of contributors, rather than having it scattered across thousands of files that relatively few people will ever see. -- Rich Bowen - rbowen(a)redhat.com OpenStack Community Liaison http://openstack.redhat.com/

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What are the minimum set of things we believe need the CLA?
by Sean Dague 02 Jun '14

02 Jun '14

An interesting conversation happened when I put up a review to pull in devstack-vagrant to gerrit from github - https://review.openstack.org/#/c/96835/ about what in gerrit requires the CLA. I specifically don't want the CLA required on this, as I've actually gotten organic contributors on github because people found it useful to show up and throw a patch my way (then came back because the round trip from patch submission to merge was very short). This in stark contrast to a conversation I had to have with a new contributor that wanted to patch the README on one of our projects, which I had to sheepishly point to our how to contribute page. Every single time I have one of these conversations I feel terrible, and that I should apologize profusely, because what we ask new contribs to go through is insane. As someone who's contributed to lots of Open Source on my spare time, a CLA is basically something that I'd never bother to touch. About 1/2 our dev tools in openstack-dev are not currently CLA required. It actually makes me wonder if any of them need to be. As these tools typically won't be part of an OpenStack release, it makes me wonder if we can drop the CLA on them entirely as a technical matter. For instance, why is there a CLA on devstack? Given that the board still seems stalled on approving a transition to the contribution framework the development community wants, I wonder if we can at least reduce the number of projects that are creating new developer friction by having a clearer view on what in gerrit we believe has to have the CLA, and ask all the other projects if they want to remove CLA enforcement. -Sean -- Sean Dague http://dague.net

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Re: [legal-discuss] What are the minimum set of things we believe need the CLA?
by Van Lindberg 31 May '14

31 May '14

I would note that its not surprising that the CLA doesn't make sense to many developers. It wasn't put in place to solve a technical problem. It was put in place to solve legal problems - specifically the problems of patents and non-repudiation of contributions by corporate employees. We can discuss how to best solve those problems, but those are the problems that need to be solved.

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27 May '14

In the Nova codebase (and presumably other openstack projects) there is often a statement "All rights reserved" placed on the same line as, or line immediately following, a company's "Copyright" statement. This is not at all consistently applied, eg in Nova, 704 files have 'All rights reserved' but 539 files do not have it: $ git grep --files-with-matches -i 'All rights reserved' -- '*.py' | wc -l 704 $ git grep --files-without-match -i 'All rights reserved' -- '*.py' | wc -l 539 When there are multiple 'Copyright XYZ Corp' lines in the source file header, it isn't entirely clear to whose copyright declaration the 'All rights reserved' statement applies - the one before, the one after, all coyright declarations, or something else... Is there any current legal reason why 'All rights reserved' is needed in source files ? I'm been under the impression this statement is obsolete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescence Is saying "All rights reserved" even relevant when we have placed the file under the Apache license ? The combo of the 'Copyright XYZ Corp' and the Apache license header should be sufficient to express the copyright status of any source file surely. So I'm wondering if there is any legal reason that prevents us removing the 'All rights reserved' statements from the source files in Nova, and any projects who wish to do a similar cleanup ? Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|

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