Open Stack

Thanks.  The more critical issue is that we need to be sensitive to our users to ensure that we have the right necessary to include the "trivial contribution" in OpenStack under the Apache license. If the "trivial contribution" is code is likely to be copyrightable (a very low standard).  All projects require a license to the code, even if they choose to use the project "license" as the license (such as Linux). 

The potential contributor should be able to derive comfort from the fact that hundreds of companies have signed the OpenStack CLA without changes (we have never agreed to any changes and Apache has also not agreed to changes in its CLA on which our CLA is based) and thousands (maybe tens of thousands) have signed the Apache CLA.  My experience is that many "legal" agreements are signed without legal review particularly if the agreement cannot be changed, so I think that your proposed scenario is not as common as you suggest. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Fifield [mailto:tom at openstack.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 8:08 AM
To: Radcliffe, Mark; Stefano Maffulli; legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

On 22/04/14 22:53, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
> Why can't they sign the CLA?  IBM and HP are very sensitive to their IP and they have signed it.

This may be completely irrelevant, but I just feel like noting that IBM and HP also have in-house counsel, who can probably look at these things
:) It's probably also worth their while, given the scale of their contributions.

However, picture a much smaller organisation. One without a lawyer on tap.

Picture a system administrator, having discovered a small flaw in OpenStack, and having goodwill to want to work with the community.

What happens in this case?

Three theories:
- sysadmin asks the manager to sign the corporate CLA, who balks at the legalese, and weighs up whether it's worth forking out x-hundred per hour for the external counsel to merely entertain their star sysadmin's pet project
- sysadmin just signs CLA without approval from anyone in the organisation
- sysadmin gives up, assuming manager won't approve

It's late, and I may be missing several other potential outcomes to this case, but these seem like poor outcomes, which are plausibly happening more frequently than we record.

We really want to encourage these kind of users to contribute, and I don't think the big problem is being sensitive to IP.

Regards,


Tom




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefano Maffulli [mailto:stefano at openstack.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 7:35 AM
> To: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
> Subject: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs
>
> I have been notified of another very small patch that is left in a 
> limbo, with the author not allowed to sign the CLA and the developers 
> stuck in unknown legal territory. You can read more about it on
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1308984
>
>  From what I can see, the patch is trivial and shouldn't even be copyrightable but the person spotting the issue and fixing it is not comfortable signing the CLAs. Can any other developer copy the patch and put it into our trunk? Until when is this sort of behaviour safe?
>
> We're getting more of these small blockers and I think it's already a problem. Having to sign a Corporate CLA and Individual CLA for a trivial patch, from an operator (whose job is to run clouds, resulting in small and rare patches, not to develop large features) can conflict with our effort to get more operators involved in OpenStack.
>
> I'm not sure what solutions are available. If we can't change the CLA processes easily, what else can we do to get small contributions like these?
>
> thanks,
> /stef
>
> --
> Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org
>
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