[legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

Richard Fontana rfontana at redhat.com
Tue Apr 22 15:36:52 UTC 2014


On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 04:34:37PM +0200, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> 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?

If I'm reading the bug discussion correctly it sounds like the author
in this specific case claims not to have any corporate affiliation,
which is conceivable. The obstacle here then seems not to be the CLA
but rather to be the same as something that was recently noted at:
http://www.alexconrad.org/2014/04/the-painful-process-of-submitting-your.html

As you and a few other subscribers to this list know I have recently
expressed some puzzlement and concern about the apparent requirement
(which I had not previously known about) that one must be (or be
employed by) an OpenStack Foundation member as a prerequisite for
submitting a patch to an OpenStack project.

I think the OpenStack Foundation *can* impose this requirement, but I
don't understand why this is seen as desirable. We now have two known
cases where it has caused problems.

For that reason I don't believe the specific issue noted there is a
legal issue as such, but a development process and
Foundation-membership-promotion policy issue. (It probably should be
discussed by people involved with the OpenStack Foundation and the
OpenStack developer community somewhere.)

- RF



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