Open Stack

My 2 cents. CLA's have their downsides too. Bureaucracy overhead is one that we're bumping into. Another big one that usually turns me off from contributing is the trust worthiness of the organization requiring the CLA over longish periods of time. I am willing to do a CLA with OpenStack since it seems very unlikely that it will be a problem with the way its structured, but CLA's have been detrimental for lots of projects that suddenly found themselves bought out. For example, MySql, OpenOffice, and Lustre spring to mind...

Its good to try and protect the project from patents. It also needs to be balanced with restricting contributions and contributors too much.

Yeah, I think we're close here. 

Thanks,
Kevin

________________________________________
From: Alice King [alice_king at att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2013 3:19 PM
To: 'Richard Fontana'; Fox, Kevin M
Cc: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: RE: [legal-discuss] Contribution snag.

The value of the CLA to my mind is that it creates a single rights holder
for the community.  This could be key if there are material patent threats,
and it would be a lynchpin of a some of the patent cooperation strategies
that have been discussed.  Comments on this?  Is there an objection to the
CLA other than the process delay and aggravation factor?

I think we are to use CC-BY for documentation, so agree that the CLA is not
necessary for a change to a comma on the wiki!

Kevin - I sense that we may have a resolution on this along the lines below.
I will forward this to Jonathan Bryce since he will have to authorize the
deviation, and the Batelle attorney to see if he has any objection to this.







-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Fontana [mailto:rfontana at redhat.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 4, 2013 4:39 PM
To: Fox, Kevin M
Cc: Alice King; legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Contribution snag.

I completely agree that the nature of what you specifically want to
contribute here shows how ridiculous this all is, which is why I asked if
you saw this as a one-time thing once I saw what your contribution actually
was. Your comparison to the Linux kernel is right on point. Also I believe
that many projects using CLAs similar to those in use by OpenStack, such as
Apache Software Foundation projects, would not require CLA signature in your
situation. I just want to make clear I am not defending the current
situation - I am a strong critic of it.

I myself had to sign an OpenStack CLA (and wait many hours for it to be
approved - I think things have improved processwise since those
days) just to fix a typo in the openstack.org wiki . I think we are seeing
here some of the problems of having baked the CLA requirement into the
OpenStack Foundation bylaws IP policy, which Red Hat attempted to raise
concerns about.

Anyway, I do think the other idea of modifying the US Government CLA - if
there is a way for you to get someone to sign that - could be a way forward.
It's not ideal.

 - Richard





On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 02:06:33PM -0800, Fox, Kevin M wrote:
> Let me try and explain it a little bit more.
>
> The problem, as I understand it, is the following:
>
> Basically, I think we have an organization that isn't a true legal
organization.
>
>  * PNNL is a National Lab, paid for by DOE and operated by Battelle for
DOE.
>  * In reality, employees at the lab seem more closely tied to PNNL then
they are to Battelle. Battelle is almost a separate organization.
>  * Legally though, there is no distinction between PNNL employees and
Battelle employees.
>  * We code stuff on behalf of DOE as independent contractors and the code
is DOE's.
>  * DOE can give the code back to us in mostly our choice of license,
within reason.
>  * PNNL employees don't have enough authority to grant patent licenses
Battelle wide.
>
> Basically, we are the right hand, and we can't grantee the left hand won't
ever be bad. We don't seem to be able to get our Head to care enough about
the code since it is really trivial/uninteresting to them. And DOE own's the
code anyway.
>
> And the silly thing about the whole thing is we are talking about a sort
comparator function, tweaks to existing templates to make them work in heat
rather then cfn, and tweaks to heat templates to start elasticsearch instead
of mongodb. Nothing that should be patent-able in the first place. Prior art
all over the place.
>
> Everyone is trying very hard not to take any risks at all for something
that is extremely unlikely to be risky. If the Linux kernel operated this
way, there wouldn't be a Linux kernel. I really do understand everyone's
position. I'm just trying to figure a way out of it. And starting to get
really frustrated by the situation. It took literally tens of minutes to
write some of the code in question. Months to attempt to get it past legal
hurdles.
>
> Does that help explain the situation?
>
> Thanks,
> Kevin
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Richard Fontana [rfontana at redhat.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2013 1:35 PM
> To: Alice King
> Cc: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
> Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Contribution snag.
>
> On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 03:56:05PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Or perhaps the Executive Director could non-materially revise the US
> Government CLA to have it cover the case of contributions coming in
> from contractors?  I realize that might seem to contradict the essence
> of my previous response, but the problem I see here is balancing
> reduction of contributor red tape against the need for a fair IPR
> licensing policy.
>
>  - RF
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> legal-discuss mailing list
> legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-discuss

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