[legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

Alice King alice_king at att.net
Wed Apr 23 01:57:01 UTC 2014


Hi Marc!   In the order of your comments:

 

I am fine and hope you are too!!  I know all of you have been carefully
working on these issues and it has been quite a while since I have been in
the trenches.  So apologies if I am speaking "out of school," but here are
my thoughts:

 

I think the Executive Director would make the call, and would probably want
the advice of legal counsel.  I want to stress that I am talking only about
exceptional cases.  The Board can set parameters for the ED and can set them
as conservatively as they think wise. In any domain the application of rules
with human judgment can lead to unintended and unwanted results.  The
Foundation does not have a judiciary, but the Bylaws do contemplate the ED
having this type of discretion on intellectual property matters.  

 

On the patent risk - forgive me if I missing something, but I am not sure I
see much additional risk here either.  Any contributor can expose the
project to the risk of a patent infringement claim by someone outside of the
community.  I don't think the CLA helps manage that risk. It only creates a
disincentive for a contributor to make a patent claim based on their own
contribution.    Again, in this particular edge case I think the risk is low
that a contributor would make that one slight change that then brings the
technology under a patent that the very same contributor holds.  But this
would be a judgment call for the ED.   Certainly the patent risk would be
part of the equation in every case.

 

Alice

From: Marc Ehrlich [mailto:mehrlich at us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 8:20 PM
To: Alice King
Cc: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org; 'Richard Fontana'
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

 

Hi Alice!!  Nice to know I am not the only one hanging out on this list and
not responding much.  Hope all's well with you!

As it relates to IP I guess I do have a few concerns with the trajectory of
this discussion.   I apologize if I am missing something obvious and if so
feel free to disregard this...

For example how do we determine what  "trivial contribution" is?  Who makes
that call?  Would it be the same to all participants?  Why are IBM and HP
and others who have signed the CLA held to a different standard and denied
the ability to make trivial contributions (not that I think we should be
able to make them I don't think they should be made at all) but if some can
make them why not all?  

Most importantly it is the patent IP I think we should be worried about.
What if that line or two of code trivially contributed completes the steps
of a patent claim held by the contributer's company that then makes open
stack users infringers of that code?  Remember our committee discussions
about contributors licenses which extend not only to the code they
contribute but its combination with the work?  This is exactly the same
point.  Even a trivial contribution  in terms of size or function can render
a body of code infringing.  I think that one of the great benefits of the
CLA is that it addresses that scenario.  So in my view we need to think long
and hard about letting companies take a pass on what everyone else has
agreed to lest we find ourselves facing patent  claims based on trivial
additions.   I would not expect (though please correct me if I am wrong)
that someone planning on doing a patent clearance against the contributor
when such contributions are made before they are deemed trivial?  I would
think that would be more than a trivial undertaking.  

Sorry if I am missing something that covers us for patents but I think I
have this right.

Marc A. Ehrlich 




"Alice King" ---04/22/2014 08:55:37 PM---Thank you Richard.  That helps put
it in perspective.   The process needs to permit a trusted person

From: "Alice King" <alice at alicelkingpc.com <mailto:alice at alicelkingpc.com> >
To: "'Richard Fontana'" <rfontana at redhat.com <mailto:rfontana at redhat.com> >,
<legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
<mailto:legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org> >, 
Date: 04/22/2014 08:55 PM
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

  _____  




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
<mailto: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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