On 09/05/2014 04:27 PM, Luis Villa wrote:

Here's my reasoning: - CCLAs are mostly signed by corporate lawyers, like me. - Corporate lawyers, like me, like to print out and examine documents before signing them. Or at least ook at them in a window that can be properly resized/zoomed (unlike the awful, user-unfriendly Adobe widget.) - Careful corporate lawyers *particularly* like to print out and examine documents that are derived from other documents (ahem, Apache CLA), so that they can compare them carefully to the original/source document.

Totally understood, in fact these requests are not uncommon. My reasoning is that I prefer to engage with corporate lawyers immediately before they go off on their own. Since we receive few requests, I prefer to know who is interested in signing it and help them out, with the CCLA and all the other complex things related to OpenStack. Probably I should make it more accessible by providing a request form, that would make it less cumbersome for counsels. Would that help?

Additionally, I *assume* (but can't test!) that the completed document can be downloaded; if that's not the case, you should fix that, since being able to retain a copy for your own records is a requirement for a valid contract in some jurisdictions (arguably including California).

Yes, the signed agreement can be downloaded. .stef -- Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org

On 09/07/2014 04:22 PM, Luis Villa wrote:

On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 4:54 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano@openstack.org> wrote:

...

On 09/05/2014 04:27 PM, Luis Villa wrote:

...

Here's my reasoning: - CCLAs are mostly signed by corporate lawyers, like me. - Corporate lawyers, like me, like to print out and examine documents before signing them. Or at least ook at them in a window that can be properly resized/zoomed (unlike the awful, user-unfriendly Adobe widget.) - Careful corporate lawyers *particularly* like to print out and examine documents that are derived from other documents (ahem, Apache CLA), so that they can compare them carefully to the original/source document.

Totally understood, in fact these requests are not uncommon.

My reasoning is that I prefer to engage with corporate lawyers immediately before they go off on their own. Since we receive few requests, I prefer to know who is interested in signing it and help them out, with the CCLA and all the other complex things related to OpenStack.

Fair - I'm obviously better positioned than most to make that assessment. If that is your goal, though, I think you should make that explicit in the documentation: instead of pointing at the CCLA and then making the CCLA painful/irritating to sign (which makes you look, frankly, amateur), you should say bluntly "if this is your corporation's first time contributing, you should put your corporate lawyers or product managers in touch with corporate@openstack.org, who can help explain the process, point them at appropriate documentation (including this CCLA[link]) ..." etc.

++ to being explicit in documentation

Thanks!

(Hope this doesn't come across as super-critical, just trying to make you more user-friendly to an unusual but important class of user :)

All feedback is super welcome. Thanks!

Definitely an improvement - thanks! On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano@openstack.org> wrote:

On 09/07/2014 04:22 PM, Luis Villa wrote:

...

Fair - I'm obviously better positioned than most to make that assessment. If that is your goal, though, I think you should make that explicit in the documentation: instead of pointing at the CCLA and then making the CCLA painful/irritating to sign (which makes you look, frankly, amateur), you should say bluntly "if this is your corporation's first time contributing, you should put your corporate lawyers or product managers in touch with corporate@openstack.org <mailto:corporate@openstack.org>, who can help explain the process, point them at appropriate documentation (including this CCLA[link]) ..." etc.

I amended the wiki page. Now it reads:

If you are contributing on behalf of a company or organization, you still need to sign the Individual CLA above but your company's corporate lawyer (or similarly high in rank) also needs to sign the Corporate Contributor License Agreement providing a list of people authorized to commit code to OpenStack. Request a printable copy by emailing the OpenStack Foundation.

Hopefully this makes it better, until we have a more self-service system.

/stef

-- Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext. 6810 *This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*

On 2015-02-05 21:26:22 +0100 (+0100), Hugo Roy wrote:

I'm reopening this issue because earlier today, I was trying to read the Individual CLA but I couldn't find a copy anywhere. I went as far as registering on Launchpad and on Gerrit where I was asked to agree to that ICLA without ever getting the opportunity to actually read the text, which is quite problematic to say the least.

Gerrit displays the text of the agreement on the page where you choose whether or not to agree to it. When you click "New Contributor Agreement" and select the radio button for ICLA it expands a box immediately below it to display the entirety of the text of the agreement with a heading "Review the agreement" before you can enter the words "I AGREE" below. If it did not do this in your browser, that's definitely a bug. I concur that for a legal document this is still suboptimal and people would probably like to refer to it outside of our contributor workflow, certainly long before going through the trouble of signing up for a contributor account only to discover that they disagree with the terms and would prefer not to be associated with our project.

Maybe it's somewhere and I just didn't see it, then it should be more obvious.

Yep, when we refactored a lot of the new contributor walkthrough documentation we seem to have linked to the agreement page on the assumption that people were getting there through the process of signing up for a new account, so we've missed an opportunity to link to https://review.openstack.org/static/cla.html (which is public but obviously not well-indexed by search engines). I'll get some more strategic links in place to make this easier for everyone to find. -- Jeremy Stanley

↪ 2015-02-05 Thu 22:08, Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>:

On 2015-02-05 21:26:22 +0100 (+0100), Hugo Roy wrote:

Gerrit displays the text of the agreement on the page where you choose whether or not to agree to it. When you click "New Contributor Agreement" and select the radio button for ICLA it expands a box immediately below it to display the entirety of the text of the agreement with a heading "Review the agreement" before you can enter the words "I AGREE" below. If it did not do this in your browser, that's definitely a bug.

I concur that for a legal document this is still suboptimal and people would probably like to refer to it outside of our contributor workflow, certainly long before going through the trouble of signing up for a contributor account only to discover that they disagree with the terms and would prefer not to be associated with our project.

I did not make it that far indeed, and I was only interested in reading the document. I think the modification on the wiki is enough to fix this. Thanks Best regards, -- Hugo Roy – Free Software Foundation Europe https://fsfe.org/about/roy Please use cryptography for email: see https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/ Merci d’utiliser la cryptographie pour l’email : voir https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/fr/