February 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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Contribution Snag
by Radcliffe, Mark 19 Feb '14

19 Feb '14

Kevin: To provide you with more context. The Legal Affairs Committee devoted an entire meeting to the issue of your contribution because it raises fundamental issues about the OpenStack policy on CLAs, including (1) fairness to members who have contributed under the existing CLAs (2) effect on future contributors who request "special treatment" and (3) administrative burden of managing multiple CLAs. As a matter of context, I am on the Legal Committee for the Apache Software Foundation and they only have the individual and corporate CLA: they do not have a government CLA and many significant government agencies, such as the NSA and JPL have executed the Corporate CLA. As an example of the problem which could arise if we granted an exception, we had a request the week prior to the Legal Affairs Committee meeting from a major multinational corporation for a special exemption from the CLA because of their unusual corporate structure. We rejected the request and noted that IBM and many other major corporations had executed the existing CLA: this response was very persuasive to them. If we provide an exception for PNNL, we will not be able to make that statement. After the discussion, the Legal Affairs Committee decided unanimously to recommend against adopting a new form of CLA and to ask PNNL to reconsider its position. I have spoken with the attorney for PNNL and he recognizes that this is part of a larger problem for PNNL as it gets more involved in open source projects (for example, the Apache Software Foundation would not even discuss any changes to the CLA). He is currently working on the issue. We hope that we can find a way for you to contribute to OpenStack and I will continue to work with him on the issue. Please consider the environment before printing this email. The information contained in this email may be confidential and/or legally privileged. It has been sent for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). If the reader of this message is not an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication, or any of its contents, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please reply to the sender and destroy all copies of the message. To contact us directly, send to postmaster(a)dlapiper.com. Thank you.

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Contribution snag.
by Fox, Kevin M 10 Feb '14

10 Feb '14

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/… "Chris Scheich"<chris(a)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(a)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/1d4ce302313f210ba5dc2a29f… Thanks, Kevin

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