Julie:
You may not have seen my later post, but I think that deals with your
concern:
I have never been consulted on this issue, but this interpretation of
the bylaws is incorrect. ATC is defined to require someone to be an
Individual Member, but ATC is concerned with voting for the Technical
Committee, it does not restrict contributions. Anyone, member or
non-member, can submit a contribution if they have signed the
relevant CLA.
Hi Mark, that sounds like great news! At this point, our tooling and
developer documentation enforce this restriction [1] (so it's not
actually possible to submit a patch without joining the Foundation).
I'll file a bug about this that references this discussion.
-----Original Message----- From: Julie Pichon
[mailto:jpichon@redhat.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 3:53 AM
To: Mark McLoughlin; Richard Fontana Cc:
legal-discuss@lists.openstack.org Subject: Re: [legal-discuss]
Trivial contributions and CLAs
On 22/04/14 23:10, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
On Tue, 2014-04-22 at 14:41 -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 06:24:10PM +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
The origin of this requirement is the definition of 'ATC'
(active technical contributor). Pre-foundation it was simply
equivalent to code contributor. You contribute, you are an
active technical contributor, and therefore you're allowed to
vote in PTL and PPB/TC elections.
Unfortunately, the Foundation bylaws state (in Appendix 4) that
ATCs must be individual members of the Foundation. There are
two ways to read that -- all contributors must be individual
members, or "ATCs" are the subset of contributors that happen
to also be individual members.
I read it the second way, FWIW.
I also believe that requiring all contributors (even a one-time
contributor of a 'drive-by patch') to be Individual Members
would have been seen as a significant aspect of Foundation
membership policy at the time the Foundation was formed, yet I
can recall no discussion on the issue. I am not saying that it is
something that ought to be stated in the OpenStack Foundation
bylaws necessarily, but I am saying that when the bylaws were
initially drafted, if it was really contemplated that all
contributors would be required to become Individual Members as a
*prerequisite* to making an initial contribution (however
trivial), it would probably have been made explicit in the bylaws
much like the CLA requirement is stated in the IP policy. In
other words I do not believe a policy of "you must join the
Foundation if you want to submit a patch" was contemplated when
the Foundation was formed. If anyone else here thinks I'm wrong
about that, or has a different recollection about this issue, I'd
be happy to hear it.
Reinforcing that point, if it is correct to read the bylaws as
saying that all contributors must join the Foundation, why
wouldn't the CLAs be unified with the membership agreements?
I have to emphasize how unusual I believe this policy is. I have
been trying to find some example of an open source
project-related membership foundation (there aren't too many of
these) with a similar policy, with no success. I think Apache
requires project leads to become members by its notion of
membership; that's the closest analogue I've been able to find.
It just strikes me intuitively as *wrong* -- isn't it in effect
coercing potential new contributors into joining an organization
they might not necessarily wish to join, or might not wish to
join until later on?
All very well stated and I agree this is rather bizarre.
I did know about this before and, interestingly, it was Julie (the
Horizon maintainer on bug #1308984[1]) who pointed out how odd
this situation is. Perhaps the Horizon project is seeing more
instances of this being an issue, or perhaps it came up in the
context of the OPW.
Hey Mark,
I often help people get started contributing to open-source and
explaining "and now you need to join the Foundation" is more
difficult to explain than even the CLA, as joining a Foundation
indicates a longer term commitment and belief in the project (in my
mind and based on experience in other projects). It seemed like
adding another barrier to making a contribution.
When a volunteer contributor is submitting their first patch to test
the waters and get a feel for the community, it seems like asking for
a lot especially when they don't know yet if they'll be sticking
around. (To the more pragmatic folks it just seems like unnecessary
bureaucracy.)
In any case, the way I see it is that a casual contributor should
be able to submit small patches with minimal friction and, later if
ever, decide they want to be more actively involved, research what
the OpenStack Foundation is all about and then join it with a view
to being an active member.
That's the order in which "joining a Foundation" would make more
sense to me, too.
Julie
One of the elements of disquiet I've heard about our CLA is that
contributors must enter into an asymmetric agreement with an
entity they have not yet learned to trust ... when they merely want
to license their work to the world under the trusted Apache
License. This membership requirement takes this a step further by
making contributors not only trust the Foundation but also to join
it.
Mark.
[1] - https://bugs.launchpad.net/horizon/+bug/1308984