Open Stack

I have never been consulted on this issue, but this interpretation of the bylaws is incorrect. ATC is defined to require someone to be an Individual Member, but ATC is concerned with voting for the Technical Committee, it does not restrict contributions.  Anyone, member or non-member, can submit a contribution if they have signed the relevant CLA.

-----Original Message-----
From: Thierry Carrez [mailto:thierry at openstack.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 9:24 AM
To: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

Richard Fontana wrote:
> [...]
> As you and a few other subscribers to this list know I have recently 
> expressed some puzzlement and concern about the apparent requirement 
> (which I had not previously known about) that one must be (or be 
> employed by) an OpenStack Foundation member as a prerequisite for 
> submitting a patch to an OpenStack project.
> 
> I think the OpenStack Foundation *can* impose this requirement, but I 
> don't understand why this is seen as desirable. We now have two known 
> cases where it has caused problems.
> 
> For that reason I don't believe the specific issue noted there is a 
> legal issue as such, but a development process and 
> Foundation-membership-promotion policy issue. (It probably should be 
> discussed by people involved with the OpenStack Foundation and the 
> OpenStack developer community somewhere.)

Maybe I can shine some light in that grey area.

The origin of this requirement is the definition of 'ATC' (active technical contributor). Pre-foundation it was simply equivalent to code contributor. You contribute, you are an active technical contributor, and therefore you're allowed to vote in PTL and PPB/TC elections.

Unfortunately, the Foundation bylaws state (in Appendix 4) that ATCs must be individual members of the Foundation. There are two ways to read that -- all contributors must be individual members, or "ATCs" are the subset of contributors that happen to also be individual members.

Since it was quite difficult to map contributors to individual members and ensure that only the subset of contributors that are individual members are considered ATCs, it was simpler to just consider the original sense of "ATC" (active contributor) and consider that the bylaws state the all contributors must be individual members of the Foundation.

Not saying it wouldn't make sense to fix that, just explaining where it comes from.

--
Thierry Carrez (ttx)

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