On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 12:38:10PM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
However, I'm still struggling to understand the benefit of the ASF being granted a special license. Why can't it be licensed the code under the Apache License?
This is an interesting question and in fact the former long-time counsel for the ASF used to say from time to time (while he was still in that role) that the Apache License could well serve as the CLA for ASF or other Apache License projects. The fact that so-called 'drive-by patches' and, as I understand it, many more substantial ones are often handled in this way by ASF projects also demonstrates this. The current legal director of the ASF (who irrelevantly happens also to be a Red Hat employee) has said without elaboration that the benefit is 'belt and suspenders'. One could point to a few subtle differences between the Apache CLA and Apache License 2.0 to make an argument that some benefit exists, but I've argued that those particular sorts of benefits are unlikely to have practical significance.
Or is the benefit of this situation that the vast bulk of code is licensed outbound from a single licensor? Is that a benefit in terms of a perception, or some "single throat to choke" legal benefit? or?
For an Apache License-outbound community project with diverse participants I personally do not see any benefit to this. The 'single throat to choke' (or in this context 'single organization to deal with') can matter -- the OpenStack Foundation fills this role -- but not for reasons having to do with licensing of the code.
Am I right in saying you're being the dog with the proverbial bone on this because clarifying this could help to undermine the need for our CLA regime?
Not really, because frankly my influence on this is limited. What I'm saying might have some educational value to people reading this (I do feel I have a special responsibility to the Red Hat developers reading this to explain this issue). Or that could be wishful thinking. As you know, the bylaws of the OpenStack Foundation unwisely baked the CLA regime into the difficult-to-amend IP policy, unprecedented AFAIK for any open source project-oriented foundation. Red Hat criticized this as an obvious flaw that would cause problems in the future,[1] but as I recall no one outside of Red Hat even saw an issue there. I think you'd need a major crisis or a massive shift in existing sentiment (particularly among lawyers involved in the OpenStack Foundation) to see a change to the CLA regime. That's unlikely. What is likely is more situations like Kevin Fox or the person you spoke with in Hong Kong. - RF [1]A few tweaks were made to the IP Policy as a result of these criticisms, but the basic flaw remains.