[OpenStack Foundation] Current state of CLA conversation?

Stefano Maffulli stefano at openstack.org
Fri Apr 3 16:04:02 UTC 2015


On Fri, 2015-04-03 at 09:38 -0400, Sean Dague wrote:
> This remains a real and unaddressed issue. From today's Nova IRC channel.
> 
> "<luv> So i got stuck while following the code contribution
> docs/process. Gotta wait for my employer to sign Corporate Contributor
> License Agreement ... oh well, 5 lines of code."
> 
> Those 5 lines of code fix a Nova live migration scenario. Because of the
> CLA that fix is unlikely to land in Kilo.

This sort of comments is IMHO unrelated to what (potential) contributors
have to sign to submit a change to OpenStack.

>From conversations I had with multiple lawyers, there seem to be an
agreement that if a contributor has doubts that 5 lines of code can
infringe on a patent owned by their employer, then they can't contribute
that code to OpenStack without asking for employer's clearance. DCO
wouldn't have an impact on this scenario, the contributor would have to
ask for permission to the employer in that case, too.

IMHO again, we may want to have another conversation (on
legal-discuss?): do we need a process in cases of small contributions
from occasional contributor, one where the patch is trivial enough to be
proposed by an ATC instead?  

> Is there an update on where the foundation stands on the CLA?

Last update is a discussion on the infra list. Thread starts here:

http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-infra/2015-March/002525.html




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