On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 04:34:37PM +0200, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
I have been notified of another very small patch that is left in a limbo, with the author not allowed to sign the CLA and the developers stuck in unknown legal territory. You can read more about it on
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1308984
From what I can see, the patch is trivial and shouldn't even be copyrightable but the person spotting the issue and fixing it is not comfortable signing the CLAs. Can any other developer copy the patch and put it into our trunk? Until when is this sort of behaviour safe?
If I'm reading the bug discussion correctly it sounds like the author in this specific case claims not to have any corporate affiliation, which is conceivable. The obstacle here then seems not to be the CLA but rather to be the same as something that was recently noted at: http://www.alexconrad.org/2014/04/the-painful-process-of-submitting-your.htm... 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.) - RF