On 2015-07-09 16:34:47 -0400 (-0400), Richard Fontana wrote: [...]
Or is the concern that a (say) GPL-licensed project might have had a pre-OpenStack history including contributions from individuals or entities that are not CLA signatories? [...]
Perhaps a slight variation on this. One work can be a derivative of another copyleft-licensed work and (at least if the copylefted work's authors can't be found or don't all agree to dual-licensing/explicit exceptions) may be bound to the same license or some license whose terms are a superset of the inherited license. We don't want to discourage people within our community from properly leveraging and extending existing free software whose provenance was not within our community. We create enough NIH/reinvented-wheel problems throughout the greater free software landscape as it is, and telling a team that they need to rewrite some base framework from scratch (because their work might be considered a derivative and therefore not Apache licensed) is just that. [DISCLAIMER: I am most definitely not a lawyer!] -- Jeremy Stanley