I have been notified of another very small patch that is left in a limbo, with the author not allowed to sign the CLA and the developers stuck in unknown legal territory. You can read more about it on
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1308984
From what I can see, the patch is trivial and shouldn't even be copyrightable but the person spotting the issue and fixing it is not comfortable signing the CLAs. Can any other developer copy the patch and put it into our trunk? Until when is this sort of behaviour safe?
We're getting more of these small blockers and I think it's already a
Thank you Richard. That helps put it in perspective. The process needs to permit a trusted person to exercise discretion in edge cases like this. That is true of every process involving human interaction. The Foundation Bylaws contemplate the Board giving this kind of edge-case discretion to the Executive Director. I don't see that there is much risk around intellectual property in this kind of contribution. Who would make a claim? There is a secondary risk that the project is viewed as being lax on IP issues generally, which would scare off some users. I think this is also unlikely. My impression is that the project is viewed as exercising an abundance of caution. The kind of participation represented by this contribution is valuable. Reward significantly outweighs risk. Still on the list and felt like chiming in! Alice -----Original Message----- From: Richard Fontana [mailto:rfontana@redhat.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 7:32 PM To: legal-discuss@lists.openstack.org Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs For anyone on this list not accustomed to looking at such things, I think it might be interesting to point out what this patch actually is and what Stefano means by triviality (even though the CLA may not be the relevant issue in this instance, the issue of contribution process around trivial patches is the larger issue that Stefano was raising): The patch would cause one existing line in one file: options = sorted([(ip.id, ip.ip) for ip in ips if not ip.port_id]) to be replaced with this: options = sorted([(ip.id, ip.ip) for ip in ips if not ip.port_id], key=lambda ip: ip[1]) That is: all this patch does is add the following text to one line of a file: ", key=lambda ip: ip[1]" The file itself contains about ~100 lines of code, and Horizon, the relevant project, contains, I believe, about 2000 files. - RF Stefano wrote: problem. Having to sign a Corporate CLA and Individual CLA for a trivial patch, from an operator (whose job is to run clouds, resulting in small and rare patches, not to develop large features) can conflict with our effort to get more operators involved in OpenStack.
I'm not sure what solutions are available. If we can't change the CLA
processes easily, what else can we do to get small contributions like these? _______________________________________________ legal-discuss mailing list legal-discuss@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-discuss