Open Stack

Oops, I think I misunderstood what was being proposed here. It's to
retroactively get rid of all past copyright notices? I agree that this
cannot be reconciled with the notion of an Apache License 2.0 grant
from the contributor (without getting permission from the copyright
holder in question -- Red Hat hereby grants such permission if
necessary).

However, this brings up again the awkward issue of the OpenStack CLA,
and the question of where the license(s) in OpenStack are actually
coming from. Granted, it may be ultimately a trivial issue for anyone
downstream, but I think it still matters. :)

I am currently under the impression that contributions to OpenStack
are effectively dual licensed: the contributor grants a special
license to the OpenStack Foundation under the CLA covering all of the
contributor's contributions, and, additionally, the contributor grants
a license to the world under the Apache License 2.0 for each actual
contribution to OpenStack. To the casual observer, the first license
would seem to make the second license superfluous, or vice versa,
depending on how you look at it.

Admittedly I am making this conclusion from the *practice* (if I
understand it correctly), at issue here, of expecting contributors to
put a relevant copyright notice and license notice in each source file
where they do not already exist, as well as the absence of any similar
practice (to my knowledge) in any other open source project with a
similar (or even different) CLA requirement. I do not believe that it
is actually documented that contributions to OpenStack are thus dual
licensed, however. It would be helpful, I think, to clear this up. 

I believe the CLA does nothing to prevent the OpenStack Foundation
from removing all copyright notices from contributions to
OpenStack. The OpenStack Foundation is also given authority under the
CLA to distribute OpenStack under the Apache License 2.0 (as though
that were the initial Apache License grant). It may be that the set
of permissions the Foundation gets under the CLA are permissions it
wishes to have in reserve but not exercise, but I have been assuming
otherwise. The OpenStack Foundation bylaws, section 7.1, seem to me to
support this assumption. There may be something uncomfortable about
this, but it's probably better to deal with the discomfort.

So when I said that I had a couple of reasons to justify what Thierry
wished to do, I had misunderstood what was desired (not having read
the thread on openstack-dev), but now that I think I understand it
correctly, one of that couple of reasons is still relevant, namely
that the OpenStack CLA gives the OpenStack Foundation the power to
remove contributors' copyright notices, assuming the contributor has
signed the OpenStack CLA.

- Richard






On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 11:27:25AM -0500, Van Lindberg wrote:
> Richard,
> 
> I would like to hear your reasoning here, as this strikes me as a
> bad idea.  By my reading, there are strict restrictions on removing
> anyone's copyright or attribution notices (cf Section 4.2 of the
> Apache license).
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Van
> 
> ______________________________________
> Van Lindberg
> VP, Intellectual Property, Rackspace
> van.lindberg at rackspace.com
> M: 214.364.7985
> 
> 
> On 5/17/13 10:47 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> >On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 05:01:51PM +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> >>Thierry Carrez wrote:
> >>>I think this is no longer a legal question (we established that they are
> >>>not necessary), but a project consistency/cleanup effort discussion...
> >>>so we should move it to openstack-dev, and discuss the three options on
> >>>the table with all the devs.
> >>Actually I think there is one more legal question around this topic...
> >>
> >>Are we allowed to unilaterally remove those copyright mentions from the
> >>header, or do we absolutely need to seek permission from the original
> >>holder ?
> >>
> >>On the -dev list discussion Sean suggested a "flag day" after which if
> >>you didn't object the new format (without copyright mentions) would be
> >>policy... I wonder if we could actually remove those mentions at that
> >>point without formal approval.
> >There are a couple of reasons why I think you can handle it this way,
> >if you want to. I can go into detail if anyone's interested
> >(especially if anyone disagrees with me).
> >
> >- RF
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >legal-discuss mailing list
> >legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
> >http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-discuss
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> legal-discuss mailing list
> legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-discuss