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

Licensing of documentation
by Richard Fontana 17 Mar '15

17 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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CCLA not available anywhere except the non-printable/non-downloadable esign app?
by Luis Villa 06 Feb '15

06 Feb '15

Hey, all- I was trying to look at the CCLA, and there doesn't appear to be a copy of it anywhere other than the e-sign form. Is that deliberate? If not, can it be posted somewhere in a downloadable/printable-for-review format? And of course, if I'm simply missing it, I'd recommend linking to it from the following pages, which is where I looked: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute#Contributors_License_Agre… https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HowToUpdateCorporateCLA (The first link has a "preview" of the ICLA but not the CCLA.) Thanks- Luis -- Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext. 6810 *This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*

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Legal-discuss
by Alan Kavanagh 22 Dec '14

22 Dec '14

Hi Openstack Can you please advise what the legalities and copyrights, and Openstack Trademarks etc are for projects that live in Stackforge and what Openstack covers for such projects. This question arises due to question I have posted in response to: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/96149/ /Alan

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How should I use pylint (GPL)?
by Angus Lees 12 Dec '14

12 Dec '14

[I'm not subscribed to legal-discuss so I'd appreciate being CCed - or I'll just read it via the archives] Context: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/120320/ pylint is a tool for static analysis of python. It is implemented in python and is GPL (and relies heavily on the 'astroid' library which is also GPL). pylint is/has been widely used by various OpenStack projects by exec'ing it as a simple black-box tool. pylint is only used (in any form) during development and not in a production deployment. In the above change, I have written a custom pylint check and I'd like to write more. Writing a custom pylint check involves importing the pylint/astroid python libraries and calling lots of pylint/astroid python functions. Mark McClain raised the (quite reasonable) concern that this change was importing a GPL'd python library and perhaps couldn't be allowed. I want the freedom to be able to make these new checks completely neutron-specific (or ditto for any other project), so I'd like the code for the checks to be close to the neutron code it is checking and "owned" by the broader neutron development community just like other forms of automated testing. So my key question is: How far does the pylint-importing code need to be before becoming acceptable? I figure my options are roughly: A. Yes, the change above is fine as written, go for it. Importing is most-likely not "deriving" in the GPL-sense and everyone needs to make their own legal assessments at the time they install/redistribute code anyway. B. The above change is fine, go for it. Continue to ensure that any production deployment doesn't require pylint to be installed so this issue never comes up during deployment. C. In the same git repo is fine, but we license these files under GPL and ensure we don't import them from other neutron code. Move the files to their own top-level subdir in the neutron git repo with a big README explanation/warning. ... Z. Move the pylint checks out to a separate git repo on stackforge-or-similar, "release" the checks via pypi, install it in the neutron 'pylint' tox environment, and use it from neutron only through an exec boundary. In the #openstack-neutron IRC discussion regarding this, I fear there's quite a bit of confusion/misunderstanding about copyright and which acts trigger the GPL obligations (and on whom). It would be great to get some authoritative advice here - and perhaps flesh out that FIXME in the legal issues FAQ ;) Thanks! - Gus

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