[legal-discuss] What are the minimum set of things we believe need the CLA?

Richard Fontana rfontana at redhat.com
Sun Jun 1 02:07:59 UTC 2014


On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 10:27:26PM +0000, Van Lindberg wrote:
> I would note that its not surprising that the CLA doesn't make sense to many
> developers. It wasn't put in place to solve a technical problem. It was put in
> place to solve legal problems 

I'm not sure I have heard any developer who has raised some criticism
of this particular CLA system saying that the CLA "doesn't make
sense". 

As to why it was put in place, the current OpenStack CLAs were
inherited with few changes from the era of Rackspace management,
without much questioning by anyone. So one might ask why Rackspace put
the original CLAs in place. I don't think there is any reliable
non-post-hoc public documentation of the rationale for why it was put
in place, unless you are now providing it, particularly given that
Rackspace adapted an existing set of agreements which by then were
being used by many corporate-managed open source projects. (I recall
that you were outside counsel to Rackspace at the time the OpenStack
Foundation was being formed, but I don't know if you were involved
further back in the original CLA decision.)

> - specifically the problems of patents and
> non-repudiation of contributions by corporate employees.

I wasn't sure what you meant by the second problem, particularly the
'corporate' part: repudiation of contributions as to which the
underlying IP right is owned by the employee, or by the employer (the
latter wouldn't easily explain why the ICLA is required of corporate
employees in typical cases, and ownership by the employee is not going
to be typical), or both. 

 - RF




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