Open Stack

[Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice,
and I am not representing the OpenStack Foundation in any legal
capacity here.]

TL;DR: You should not be putting "Copyright OpenStack Foundation" on
content in Git repositories, or anywhere else for that matter
(unless you know that you are actually an employee of the OSF or
otherwise performing work-for-hire activities at the behest of the
OSF). The OpenStack Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA)
does not require copyright assignment. The foundation does not want,
nor does it even generally accept, copyright assignment from
developers. Your copyrightable contributions are your own, or by
proxy are the copyright of your employer if you have created them as
a part of any work-for-hire arrangement (unless you've negotiated
with your employer to retain copyright of your work).

This topic has been raised multiple times in the past. In the wake
of a somewhat protracted thread on the
legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org mailing list (it actually started
out on the openstack-dev mailing list but was then redirected to a
more appropriate venue) back in April, 2013, we attempted to record
a summary in the wiki article we'd been maintaining regarding
various frequently-asked legal questions:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/LegalIssuesFAQ#OpenStack_Foundation_Copyright_Headers

In the intervening years, we've worked to make sure other important
documentation moves out of the wiki and into more durable
maintenance (mostly Git repositories under code review, rendered and
published to a Web site). I propose that as this particular topic is
germane to contributing to the development of OpenStack software,
the OpenStack Technical Committee should publish a statement on the
governance site similar in nature to or perhaps as an expansion of
the https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/licensing.html
page where we detail copyright licensing expectations for official
OpenStack project team deliverables. As I look back through that
wiki article, I see a few other sections which may also be
appropriate to cover on the governance site.

The reason I'm re-raising this age-old discussion is because change
https://review.openstack.org/596619 came to my attention a few
minutes ago, in which some 400+ files within the
openstack/openstack-helm repository were updated to assign copyright
to "OpenStack Foundation" based on this discussion from an
openstack-helm IRC meeting back in March (which seems to have
involved no legal representative of the OSF):
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/openstack_helm/2018/openstack_helm.2018-03-20-15.00.log.html#l-101

There are also a couple of similar changes under the same review
topic for the openstack/openstack-helm-infra and
openstack/openstack-helm-addons repositories, one of which I managed
to -1 before it could be approved and merged. I don't recall any
follow-up discussion on the legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org or
even openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org mailing lists, which I would
have expected for any change of this legal significance.

The point of this message is of course not to berate anyone, but to
raise the example which seems to indicate that as a community we've
apparently not done a great job of communicating the legal aspects
of contributing to OpenStack. If there are no objections, I'll push
up a proposed addition to the openstack/governance repository
addressing this semi-frequent misconception and follow up with a
link to the review. I'm also going to post to the legal-discuss ML
so as to make the subscribers there aware of this thread.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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