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Hi Everyone.  I have been taking with Kevin and the attorney for Batelle as
a legal representative for the Foundation.  Batelle is the contractor who
runs the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) where Kevin works.  As
I understand it, Batelle runs various labs for the US Government in addition
to PNNL.   http://www.battelle.org/   The Batelle lawyer has explained that
they are unable to sign the Apache Corporate CLA because they face
significant internal barriers to granting a patent license that could
incorporate work at other facilities they manage. 

Batelle has offered two suggestions: 

1.	 The Foundation accept the work as public domain work:  The Batelle
lawyer believes the public domain route is available under rules that permit
federal contractors to treat "de minimis" contributions as public domain
work.     

2.	The Foundation accept Kevin's contribution under the Educational
Community License, rather than Apache 2.0.  The Educational Community
License is like the Apache 2.0 license, but with a limit on the patent
license to only those works of the individual who created the work, not the
entity where the individual works.  You can read about the ECL license here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_Community_License

I would appreciate any thoughts anyone has on this issue.  I do not favor
the public domain treatment because it does not address the patent issues at
all.  I would also note that the Foundation Bylaws require the Board to
approve a contribution other than under the existing CLA's.

It seems likely that issue will come up again, so it would be a good idea to
think about this in terms of a "policy."

I hope Batelle, Kevin will jump in with additional information.

Alice  King

-----Original Message-----
From: Fox, Kevin M [mailto:kevin.fox at pnnl.gov] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 6, 2013 5:12 PM
To: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: [legal-discuss] Contribution snag.

Hello OpenStack Legal,

I'm trying to contribute something and have run into some snags. See email
below. Steve told me that the Foundation is the one needing to receive this.
I tried but got no response so I'm forwarding it to the legal list.

Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Fox, Kevin M
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 5:16 PM
To: Steve Baker
Subject: Heat contribution

Hi Steve,

I've been looking through the individual contributor level agreement and in
section 7 it mentions contacting the project manager, which I think is you
for heat?

I have a contribution which is for a set of heat templates that make it
possible to spawn a scalable, sharded mongodb cluster. It should be of great
use to the Trove folks, as well as others.

I've been trying to contribute code for a while and the contributor
agreement has made this very difficult.

Long story short:
 * I work for a national lab and while the contribution was created by us
government funds and owned by the us government, we are operated by a
corporation, Battelle and I am technically a Battelle employee. There really
isn't an agreement that seems to cover this case other then the individual
agreement with a contribution from others.
 * All parts of the work that aren't derived directly from existing
heat-templates has been put in the public domain.
 * No one at the lab has the legal authority to sign a Corporate contributor
level agreement. We can't sign a us government contributor agreement since
we are technically not the us government. We are contractors that the
government gave the code to under the public domain.

Since the code is out there public domain, I believe an individual
contributor agreement works via section 7 and I just need to figure out how
to get the code to the right person. Is that you?

The work history is:
It started out as templates from here:
https://mongodb-documentation.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ecosystem/tutorial/a
utomate-deployment-with-cloudformation.html
"Chris Scheich"<chris at mongodb.com> from 10gen verified it was public domain.

It was modified a bit here:
https://github.com/andresdouglas/aws-cfn-mongostack
By "Andres Douglas"<andres.douglas at gmail.com> whom I contacted and he also
has public domained the work.

I personally modified the templates including some code from the
openstack/heat-templates repository and added some original code.

Changes contributed by me has cleared legal and export controls and is under
the public domain.

So all licensing is accounted for and should be acceptable to the OpenStack
community and being public domain, I should be able to contribute it.

The code is located at the following link. It is Submitted on behalf of a
third-party: US Government
https://github.com/EMSL-MSC/heat-templates/commit/1d4ce302313f210ba5dc2a29fa
a2764db57e45d4

Thanks,
Kevin
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