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

Richard Fontana rfontana at redhat.com
Mon Jun 2 15:38:13 UTC 2014


On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 09:46:57AM -0400, Sean Dague wrote:
> 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 is suggesting that (possibly but for the bylaws) some categories
of software could be usefully identified as clearly excludable from
the CLA requirement. This is already happening today in a kind of de
facto unofficial way, arguably, depending on how draconian the CLA
requirement is assumed to be, and there's probably some concern over
the propriety of this degree of flexibility introduced into the CLA
system. There is to my knowledge no official or explicit
subject-matter carveout for projects that don't have to opt in to the
CLA system.

What the bylaws say is that "The Foundation shall generally accept
contributions of software made pursuant to" the CLAs. I don't recall
the history of that word 'generally' but to me it can be read in two
opposing ways ('as a general requirement, without exception' or 'in
the general case, with some exceptions'). If it means 'without
exception', and if 'the Foundation [accepting] contributions of
software' is supposed to encompass all software development activities
involving official OpenStack infrastructure, then I'm guessing the
bylaws have never matched reality.

I also think what Sean is suggesting is that one sensible line would
be (or would have been) whether a project is, or is reasonably likely
to become, part of an OpenStack release.

  - RF



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