Open Stack

On Fri, 2014-05-23 at 04:12 +0000, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
> We should also ensure that we note that the  issue of "friction"
> caused by CLAs may have been misplaced because of confusion about the
> link between contributors and Individual Members. Until recently the
> Technical Committee was requiring all individual contributors to
> become an Individual Members. As I noted in response to that question
> about a month ago, this condition was a misunderstanding of the
> bylaws. The bylaws only require that a contributor join if he wants to
> qualify to vote for the Technical Committee. Anyone can make a
> contribution if they have signed the CLA.

Thanks, and yes I think this is pretty well understood now. Some work
remains to actually remove the requirement to be a member of the
foundation in order to contribute, but I think everyone is in agreement
that it should happen.

FWIW, I expect the infra team are unlikely to make these changes in the
short term because the change would automatically happen as part of a
switch to the DCO, whereas trying to implement the change with our
current CLA system would actually require a bunch of additional work.

That said, the requirement to become an individual member is only one
small element of the contributor friction described in the wiki page.
Indeed, we deliberately barely mentioned it since we understand it's
only related to the CLA friction for historical reasons.

Mark.