Open Stack

Sorry for the noise folks - the change was well-intentioned but uninformed!  We will revert the changes.

Thanks,
Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2018 12:00 PM
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
Cc: MCEUEN, MATT <MM9745 at att.com>
Subject: [all][tc][openstack-helm] On the problem of OSF copyright headers

[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