Open Stack

On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 03:55:39PM -0600, Alice King wrote:
> Thanks Richard.   So then Jonathan would make a decision that where both of
> two conditions were met, a modified version of the Federal Government
> Contractor CLA would be used.  The two conditions would be (i) the work was
> created by a contractor under a federal government contract, and (ii) the
> copyright in the work is public domain.  
> 
> I understand that the rule for federal contractors is that they do retain
> copyright absent some exception or special term in the agreement.  In this
> case, Batelle would have to decide, and represent to the Foundation, that
> Kevin's work was public domain - presumably under the "de minimis" exception
> suggested by the Batelle lawyer.
>
> If we take this approach, it seems to me that the US Government CLA would be
> the best CLA to non-materially revise since it already reflects that the
> copyright is public domain.  The non-material revision could be the addition
> of the sentence that appears in the Educational Community License:  "Any
> patent license granted hereby with respect to contributions by an individual
> employed by an institution or organization is limited to patent claims where
> the individual that is the author of the Work is also the inventor of the
> patent claims licensed, and where the organization or institution has the
> right to grant such license under applicable grant and research funding
> agreements. No other express or implied licenses are granted."
> 
> Is this consistent with what you are thinking might work?

Not entirely ... I don't believe that would work as a modification to
the US Government CLA. Battelle suggested use of the ECL on the
assumption that it would be the entity bound by the CLA, not the
government.

I was actually imagining an alteration of the US Government CLA
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GovernmentCLA that explicitly noted
that the contribution might consist of work done by federal
contractors. It could, perhaps, then be limited to cases where the
contractor's work is noncopyrightable/de minimis (as we are assuming
is true of Kevin's current work) but this doesn't seem to be generally
useful, since we have to assume the more typical case will be that the
contractor's contribution is copyrightable.

Actually, I just noticed that the existing US Government CLA omits the
section 7 language that is in the other CLAs (see Kevin's initial
posting in this thread). So perhaps the simplest thing to do is to
restore that language to the US Government CLA, or modify it slightly
to cover the case of work done by federal contractors. That requires
"identifying the complete details of its source and of any license or
other restriction (including, but not limited to, related patents,
trademarks, and license agreements) of which you are personally
aware". In a sense, similar to the suggestion Kevin originally made,
except we're assuming some representative of the relevant US
government agency is signing the CLA.

This does create a possible asymmetry in patent licensing under
certain scenarios, but I'm not sure how realistic they are.

Of course section 7 suggests that any direct contributor to OpenStack
who has signed the Indiidual or Corporate CLA could submit Kevin's
contribution anyway.

- Richard