I think that we should have a plain language explanation. We can certainly do something similar to the "license deed". -----Original Message----- From: Stefano Maffulli [mailto:stefano@openstack.org] Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:07 AM To: legal-discuss@lists.openstack.org Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs I agree with Mark McLoughlin that the CLA may seem redundant and I also see how changing that mechanism is too complicated, at the moment. I think it's better to focus on improving what we have and consider it a tech debt, to be fixed in the future. On 04/22/2014 05:28 PM, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
The potential contributor should be able to derive comfort from the fact that hundreds of companies have signed the OpenStack CLA without changes (we have never agreed to any changes and Apache has also not agreed to changes in its CLA on which our CLA is based) and thousands (maybe tens of thousands) have signed the Apache CLA. My experience is that many "legal" agreements are signed without legal review particularly if the agreement cannot be changed, so I think that your proposed scenario is not as common as you suggest.
That's good to know, Mark. If I understand you correctly, one possible response to small shops feeling uneasy about the Corporate/Individual CLA is to reassure them that our agreement is a standard, never modified, and it's very safe to sign without much questions... I'm not sure how to put it down in a safe, reassuring way though. Would a brief paragraph in an email be enough? Mark (Radcliffe): can you help draft a standard response to people like the one quoted before? Maybe we want to add something like the 'license deed' provided by Creative Commons somewhere on our pages? Given that developers/operators seem to be afraid of diving into a legal nightmare with strange contracts to sign, "human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the license" may help, too. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Thoughts? /stef -- Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org _______________________________________________ legal-discuss mailing list legal-discuss@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-discuss Please consider the environment before printing this email. The information contained in this email may be confidential and/or legally privileged. It has been sent for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). If the reader of this message is not an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication, or any of its contents, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please reply to the sender and destroy all copies of the message. To contact us directly, send to postmaster@dlapiper.com. Thank you.