Open Stack

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:28:16AM -0500, Rich Bowen wrote:

> This sounds good to me. Major contributors should be encouraged to
> sign a CLA, to protect the Foundation, but smaller contributions (no
> idea where to draw the line here) don't seem to require that. (This
> is, anyways, how the ASF handles this.)

Although that is not actually what Mark is suggesting, thanks for
pointing this out. I have been separately pointing out in an off-list
email thread involving the legal affairs committee (relevant to the
Kevin Fox case) that the ASF does not have the same CLA system as
OpenStack, but a far more liberal system. Yet I have had the
impression that OpenStack's system may have been based on a belief
that it was in line with what the ASF does (I'm not sure if that's so,
admittedly). I can't imagine that there was any point at which someone
at Rackspace or the OpenStack Foundation looked at the ASF system, the
actual practice of which is not well known outside the ASF, and
decided it was insufficiently comprehensive or restrictive.

OpenStack's CLA system is in line with how I see Apache-style CLAs
used by open source projects that are tightly controlled by one
corporation, which is not the situation we have with OpenStack. But
even in those cases I wonder whether the difference in the CLA system
is the result of inadequate knowledge about what the ASF, the
originator of these kinds of CLAs, actually does.

 - RF