On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:28:16AM -0500, Rich Bowen wrote:
This sounds good to me. Major contributors should be encouraged to sign a CLA, to protect the Foundation, but smaller contributions (no idea where to draw the line here) don't seem to require that. (This is, anyways, how the ASF handles this.)
Although that is not actually what Mark is suggesting, thanks for pointing this out. I have been separately pointing out in an off-list email thread involving the legal affairs committee (relevant to the Kevin Fox case) that the ASF does not have the same CLA system as OpenStack, but a far more liberal system. Yet I have had the impression that OpenStack's system may have been based on a belief that it was in line with what the ASF does (I'm not sure if that's so, admittedly). I can't imagine that there was any point at which someone at Rackspace or the OpenStack Foundation looked at the ASF system, the actual practice of which is not well known outside the ASF, and decided it was insufficiently comprehensive or restrictive. OpenStack's CLA system is in line with how I see Apache-style CLAs used by open source projects that are tightly controlled by one corporation, which is not the situation we have with OpenStack. But even in those cases I wonder whether the difference in the CLA system is the result of inadequate knowledge about what the ASF, the originator of these kinds of CLAs, actually does. - RF