[legal-discuss] OpenStack and its CLA [was Re: Copyright statements in source]

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Tue May 13 21:28:22 UTC 2014


Hey

Along the lines of what I laid out in below email from January, Richard
and I completed a first draft of such a document last Friday:

  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStackAndItsCLA

It's a 5000 word document that attempts to capture as much of the
nuances of this as we could.

No doubt there are many conflicting opinions about this and much
discussion is needed ... just as we anticipated in the below email.

Please do feel free to react here to any of the points made in the wiki
page. Any and all feedback is welcome.

We also had a design summit session today where we gathered some
feedback from the technical community, particularly about where we're
seeing the CLA cause contributor friction or an image problem for the
project. See here:

  https://etherpad.openstack.org/openstack-and-its-cla

My interpretation of the session is that there's a good level of
consensus amongst the technical project leadership that there are issues
and a change to the DCO should be seriously considered.

Thanks,
Mark. 

On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 10:55 +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> I think it's worth having a properly informed discussion involving the
> Foundation Board and Legal Affairs Committee.
> 
> To do so, we'd need to pull together some points into a document:
> 
>   - why the CLA process is causing friction
> 
>   - a review of practices adopted by some other large, well known and 
>     comparable projects
> 
>   - how OpenStack's process differs from other projects using CLAs, 
>     like the ASF
> 
>   - enumerating the perceived benefits and explaining why they are a 
>     misconception, not a major benefit or that a similar effect can be 
>     achieved differently
> 
>   - a concrete proposal for a change to DCO, including infra changes, 
>     education, bylaws amendment, etc.
> 
>   - a FAQ section which anticipates additional concerns people may have
> 
> I'd take this to the TC first to double-check that there's consensus
> amongst the contributor community to make a move like this.
> 
> Unfortunately, there's no quick way to make this happen, but I think if
> we can get the process moving we should be able to make it happen.
> 
> Mark.





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