On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 10:27:26PM +0000, Van Lindberg wrote:

I would note that its not surprising that the CLA doesn't make sense to many developers. It wasn't put in place to solve a technical problem. It was put in place to solve legal problems

I'm not sure I have heard any developer who has raised some criticism of this particular CLA system saying that the CLA "doesn't make sense". As to why it was put in place, the current OpenStack CLAs were inherited with few changes from the era of Rackspace management, without much questioning by anyone. So one might ask why Rackspace put the original CLAs in place. I don't think there is any reliable non-post-hoc public documentation of the rationale for why it was put in place, unless you are now providing it, particularly given that Rackspace adapted an existing set of agreements which by then were being used by many corporate-managed open source projects. (I recall that you were outside counsel to Rackspace at the time the OpenStack Foundation was being formed, but I don't know if you were involved further back in the original CLA decision.)

- specifically the problems of patents and non-repudiation of contributions by corporate employees.

I wasn't sure what you meant by the second problem, particularly the 'corporate' part: repudiation of contributions as to which the underlying IP right is owned by the employee, or by the employer (the latter wouldn't easily explain why the ICLA is required of corporate employees in typical cases, and ownership by the employee is not going to be typical), or both. - RF