Open Stack

If I understand the situation correctly, it seems like Battelle
believes that federal government contractors deserve special treatment
and should be subject to patent licensing rules that are more lenient
than what is supposed to apply to other contributors to OpenStack. The
reasoning that I believe Battelle is using does not seem to be
specific to federal government contractors and could be asserted by
other patent-holding corporation contributing to or thinking of
contributing to OpenStack. 

None of the existing CLAs in use by the OpenStack Foundation seems
suitable here. 

Given the obstacles contained in the OpenStack Foundation bylaws IP
policy to flexibility in handling inbound contributions, I think the
easiest solution (though not the most desirable one) would be for the
Executive Director to make "non material amendments" to the Individual
(and/or Corporate) CLA so that a federal government contractor not
holding copyright on what is being contributed can use such a
CLA. Assuming this means Battelle would sign the Corporate CLA, this
would mean that the patent license clause of the Corporate CLA would
apply to Battelle. Battelle seems to accept that it *could* sign
something like the Corporate CLA, the problem for Battelle being that
the patent license clause is leading to too much internal
resistance. 

Given my understanding of OpenStack development practice I believe
this would also mean that Battelle would be directly licensing Kevin's
contributions under the Apache License 2.0. Clearly Battelle believes
it can grant such a license in principle because it is willing to use
the similar ECL.

Just my US$0.02. Like, I think, most of my Red Hat colleagues who are
contributing to OpenStack, I would prefer to see a very different
approach to handling inbound contributions for OpenStack, which would
probably avoid these kinds of obstacles. But until that happens I
think the rules in place (as enforced by the OpenStack Foundation)
should apply equally to all participants.

- Richard





On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 09:35:34AM -0600, Alice King wrote:
> 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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> legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
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> 
> 
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