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

Sean Dague sean at dague.net
Mon Jun 2 13:46:57 UTC 2014


On 05/31/2014 12:33 PM, Alan Clark wrote:
> 
> 
>>>> On 5/31/2014 at 05:00 AM, Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> wrote: 
>> An interesting conversation happened when I put up a review to pull in
>> devstack-vagrant to gerrit from github -
>> https://review.openstack.org/#/c/96835/ about what in gerrit requires
>> the CLA. I specifically don't want the CLA required on this, as I've
>> actually gotten organic contributors on github because people found it
>> useful to show up and throw a patch my way (then came back because the
>> round trip from patch submission to merge was very short).
>>
>> This in stark contrast to a conversation I had to have with a new
>> contributor that wanted to patch the README on one of our projects,
>> which I had to sheepishly point to our how to contribute page. Every
>> single time I have one of these conversations I feel terrible, and that
>> I should apologize profusely, because what we ask new contribs to go
>> through is insane. As someone who's contributed to lots of Open Source
>> on my spare time, a CLA is basically something that I'd never bother to
>> touch.
>>
>> About 1/2 our dev tools in openstack-dev are not currently CLA required.
>> It actually makes me wonder if any of them need to be. As these tools
>> typically won't be part of an OpenStack release, it makes me wonder if
>> we can drop the CLA on them entirely as a technical matter. For
>> instance, why is there a CLA on devstack?
>>
>> Given that the board still seems stalled on approving a transition to
> Sean - I am going to differ with your opinion here. I realize you are trying to push action but please be more accurate as to not lead people feel the board is somehow the bad guy.  The board is not stalled.  When this topic started a couple months back a response was given and posted. I get it that some don't like the answer given and are pushing for change. Much of that discussion started at the Summit after the Summit board meeting. Please recognize that the Board has not met since that date, nor was it on the agenda at the Summit board meeting.  You may also have seen my recommendations to Mark for information and actions needed before placing it on the agenda at the July board meeting.
> 
> Please also recognize that the changes being asked for are not quick changes if they entail bylaw changes, changes to member agreements, etc. 
> Sean - Please note that I am not trying to fight the change, I simply have to ensure that it is the right change for the interest of the full community of individual and corporate members and sponsors. 

I guess I saw the CLA conversation as starting far before that board
meeting (especially with the situation with Kevin going on for months
without him getting a response). However my touch points for the board
are limited, so my perception could be wrong there.

>> the contribution framework the development community wants, I wonder if
> 
> I don't necessarily dispute your statement of "the  development community wants..."  but with over 2000 code contributors and 16,000 members I'd be curious if you have any supporting data?  I'm not asking for you to do a poll, am just curious if you have data that I haven't seen. We have a sample number on this mailing list, some ideas of the interest from the BoF at the Summit and comments made on other lists, etc.  I guess the ultimate answer on that question will be through polling the membership on a bylaws change. 

My data is only personal. In that I've had many many interactions where
people felt the CLA was an inhibition to the development of OpenStack
(including being an inhibitor to getting existing experienced python /
open source developers to participate where it wasn't part of their day
job), and zero interactions where people felt it was helping.

Given our conversations at the summit about a primary bottleneck for
OpenStack development being a lack of such expertise to help participate
in code review, I consider this a pretty key issue.

And realistically, at this point, I'd like to find various ways that we
can lesson it's impact within our existing framework. Which was really
where this email started. Because if we can at least agree the chunk of
code that parties believe has to be under the CLA we might provide some
great places for people to collaborate, become involved in our
community, and onboard more quickly outside of that.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net

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