On Wed, Apr 23 2014, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
On Tue, 2014-04-22 at 20:57 -0500, Alice King wrote:
I think the Executive Director would make the call, and would probably want the advice of legal counsel. I want to stress that I am talking only about exceptional cases. The Board can set parameters for the ED and can set them as conservatively as they think wise. In any domain the application of rules with human judgment can lead to unintended and unwanted results. The Foundation does not have a judiciary, but the Bylaws do contemplate the ED having this type of discretion on intellectual property matters.
A process whereby the project's lead developers must ask for permission from the ED in order to accept these sort of contributions wouldn't be much less intolerable than the current situation IMO.
The goal here should be to eliminate any such friction so that we can encourage these types of contributions from the wider operators community.
+1 to all of that. It's a real pain to have to sign CLA or any kind of legal agreements before sending a trivial patch, and that is a lot of frictions for people just passing by in the project. And as the project grows, this is going to happen more and more often. FWIW, GNU's using a rough limit of ~15 SLOC to determine what could be trivial or no: http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant -- Julien Danjou // Free Software hacker // http://julien.danjou.info