On 23/05/14 14:11, Anne Gentle wrote:
On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 11:12 PM, Radcliffe, Mark < Mark.Radcliffe@dlapiper.com> wrote:
I agree with Richard's summary and will provide some additional information. My understanding during the drafting of the bylaws was that the ICLA and CCLA (which are based on standard Apache documents) had been used from the beginning of the project and had become part of the project's culture. Moreover the form of ICLA and CCLA were sufficiently important to the community that the form of CLAs were "locked" into the bylaws by making them exhibits (with some flexibility granted to the Board) and were included among the limited number of sections whose amendment requires a vote of the Board, the Individual Members, the Gold Members and the Platinum Members.
We have discussed this issue twice at the Legal Affairs Committee, particularly in the context of so called "trivial contributions". Each time we considered the history of the project, the commitments of the existing participants under the CLAs, our perception of the modest "friction" caused by the requirement to click the CLA and the expectations of existing members about future participants providing rights under the CLA. Both times we concluded that change was not appropriate. The Legal Affairs Committee is ready to work with the community to assist the Board to understand the issues in adopting the DCO procedure for some or all contributions. The ultimate decision belongs to the Board.
We should also ensure that we note that the issue of "friction" caused by CLAs may have been misplaced because of confusion about the link between contributors and Individual Members. Until recently the Technical Committee was requiring all individual contributors to become an Individual Members. As I noted in response to that question about a month ago, this condition was a misunderstanding of the bylaws. The bylaws only require that a contributor join if he wants to qualify to vote for the Technical Committee. Anyone can make a contribution if they have signed the CLA.
Ah, this aspect is good to uncover, especially for documentation. Does the infra team have a task to decouple the "join the Foundation" steps and identity from the git review required setup steps?
Anne
FYI, I filed a bug about this [1] when we had the previous conversation. The last comment on the bug suggests that because the requirement was added at the Foundation's request, some additional discussion is likely to be required first. Thanks, Julie [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-ci/+bug/1311665