Open Stack

Thank you Richard.  That helps put it in perspective.  

The process needs to permit a trusted person to exercise discretion in edge
cases like this.  That is true of every process involving human interaction.
The Foundation Bylaws contemplate the Board giving this kind of edge-case
discretion to the Executive Director.

I don't see that there is much risk around intellectual property in this
kind of contribution.  Who would make a claim?  There is a secondary risk
that the project is viewed as being lax on IP issues generally, which would
scare off some users.  I think this is also unlikely.  My impression is that
the project is viewed as exercising an abundance of caution.  

The kind of participation represented by this contribution is valuable.
Reward significantly outweighs risk.

Still on the list and felt like chiming in!  

Alice


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Fontana [mailto:rfontana at redhat.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 7:32 PM
To: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

For anyone on this list not accustomed to looking at such things, I think it
might be interesting to point out what this patch actually is and what
Stefano means by triviality (even though the CLA may not be the relevant
issue in this instance, the issue of contribution process around trivial
patches is the larger issue that Stefano was raising):

The patch would cause one existing line in one file:

    options = sorted([(ip.id, ip.ip) for ip in ips if not ip.port_id])

to be replaced with this:
     
    options = sorted([(ip.id, ip.ip) for ip in ips if not ip.port_id],
key=lambda ip: ip[1])

That is: all this patch does is add the following text to one line of a
file:
  ", key=lambda ip: ip[1]" 
The file itself contains about ~100 lines of code, and Horizon, the relevant
project, contains, I believe, about 2000 files.
 
 - RF


Stefano 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?
>
> 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?


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