[legal-discuss] Contribution snag.

Fox, Kevin M kevin.fox at pnnl.gov
Wed Nov 6 23:11:44 UTC 2013


Hello OpenStack Legal,

I'm trying to contribute something and have run into some snags. See email below. Steve told me that the Foundation is the one needing to receive this. I tried but got no response so I'm forwarding it to the legal list.

Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Fox, Kevin M
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 5:16 PM
To: Steve Baker
Subject: Heat contribution

Hi Steve,

I've been looking through the individual contributor level agreement and in section 7 it mentions contacting the project manager, which I think is you for heat?

I have a contribution which is for a set of heat templates that make it possible to spawn a scalable, sharded mongodb cluster. It should be of great use to the Trove folks, as well as others.

I've been trying to contribute code for a while and the contributor agreement has made this very difficult.

Long story short:
 * I work for a national lab and while the contribution was created by us government funds and owned by the us government, we are operated by a corporation, Battelle and I am technically a Battelle employee. There really isn't an agreement that seems to cover this case other then the individual agreement with a contribution from others.
 * All parts of the work that aren't derived directly from existing heat-templates has been put in the public domain.
 * No one at the lab has the legal authority to sign a Corporate contributor level agreement. We can't sign a us government contributor agreement since we are technically not the us government. We are contractors that the government gave the code to under the public domain.

Since the code is out there public domain, I believe an individual contributor agreement works via section 7 and I just need to figure out how to get the code to the right person. Is that you?

The work history is:
It started out as templates from here:
https://mongodb-documentation.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ecosystem/tutorial/automate-deployment-with-cloudformation.html
"Chris Scheich"<chris at mongodb.com> from 10gen verified it was public domain.

It was modified a bit here:
https://github.com/andresdouglas/aws-cfn-mongostack
By "Andres Douglas"<andres.douglas at gmail.com> whom I contacted and he also has public domained the work.

I personally modified the templates including some code from the openstack/heat-templates repository and added some original code.

Changes contributed by me has cleared legal and export controls and is under the public domain.

So all licensing is accounted for and should be acceptable to the OpenStack community and being public domain, I should be able to contribute it.

The code is located at the following link. It is Submitted on behalf of a third-party: US Government
https://github.com/EMSL-MSC/heat-templates/commit/1d4ce302313f210ba5dc2a29faa2764db57e45d4

Thanks,
Kevin


More information about the legal-discuss mailing list