Open Stack

I think that we should have a plain language explanation.   We can certainly do something similar to the "license deed".

-----Original Message-----
From: Stefano Maffulli [mailto:stefano at openstack.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:07 AM
To: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] Trivial contributions and CLAs

I agree with Mark McLoughlin that the CLA may seem redundant and I also see how changing that mechanism is too complicated, at the moment. I think it's better to focus on improving what we have and consider it a tech debt, to be fixed in the future.

On 04/22/2014 05:28 PM, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
> 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.

That's good to know, Mark. If I understand you correctly, one possible response to small shops feeling uneasy about the Corporate/Individual CLA is to reassure them that our agreement is a standard, never modified, and it's very safe to sign without much questions...

I'm not sure how to put it down in a safe, reassuring way though. Would a brief paragraph in an email be enough? Mark (Radcliffe): can you help draft a standard response to people like the one quoted before?

Maybe we want to add something like the 'license deed' provided by Creative Commons somewhere on our pages? Given that developers/operators seem to be afraid of diving into a legal nightmare with strange contracts to sign, "human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the license" may help, too.

 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Thoughts?

/stef

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