Open Stack

On Wed, Apr 23 2014, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> On Tue, 2014-04-22 at 20:57 -0500, Alice King wrote:
>> I think the Executive Director would make the call, and would probably want
>> the advice of legal counsel.  I want to stress that I am talking only about
>> exceptional cases.  The Board can set parameters for the ED and can set them
>> as conservatively as they think wise. In any domain the application of rules
>> with human judgment can lead to unintended and unwanted results.  The
>> Foundation does not have a judiciary, but the Bylaws do contemplate the ED
>> having this type of discretion on intellectual property matters.  
>
> A process whereby the project's lead developers must ask for permission
> from the ED in order to accept these sort of contributions wouldn't be
> much less intolerable than the current situation IMO.
>
> The goal here should be to eliminate any such friction so that we can
> encourage these types of contributions from the wider operators
> community.

+1 to all of that. It's a real pain to have to sign CLA or any kind of
legal agreements before sending a trivial patch, and that is a lot of
frictions for people just passing by in the project. And as the project
grows, this is going to happen more and more often.

FWIW, GNU's using a rough limit of ~15 SLOC to determine what could be
trivial or no:

  http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant

-- 
Julien Danjou
// Free Software hacker
// http://julien.danjou.info
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