Open Stack

I will supplement Alan's comments by noting that I am working with the Foundation to review the current procedures to see if we can streamline them and the Legal Affairs Committee will be discussing these issues in the near term so we can present the issues to the Board.  As Alan noted, the bylaws which were adopted by the Foundation imposes certain requirements on use of the CLA (see Article VII of the bylaws) and changes to this Article require a vote by the Board, Platinum Members, Gold Members and Individual Members.

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Clark [mailto:aclark at suse.com] 
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2014 9:34 AM
To: Sean Dague; legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] What are the minimum set of things we believe need the CLA?



>>> 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. 

> 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. 

-AlanClark


> we can at least reduce the number of projects that are creating new 
> developer friction by having a clearer view on what in gerrit we 
> believe has to have the CLA, and ask all the other projects if they 
> want to remove CLA enforcement.
> 
> 	-Sean
> 
> --
> Sean Dague
> http://dague.net



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