Response to Jim's post sent to legal@, with PMC-specific notes;
Let's put just legal@ questions to legal and keep the rest for
this list, eh? If you remain confused, I suggest you actually
read the bugzilla ticket to understand how Sam confused the issue.
Sam effectively concludes, after spending a month suggesting that
Roy's guidance was insufficent, that (while refusing to say as much),
yup, Roy was right throughout. No big surprise. I will update both
apr and httpd dev pages in the coming days to clarify and the issue
shouldn't come up again.
Returning to PMC business;
Graham, please proceed as Sam's questions on the ticket have been
asked and answered and he raises no further concern. The firehose
contribution is already in core, now correctly considered and with
no further IP steps needed. The policy module into modules/test/
is equally ready for you to import. Sorry we didn't reach agreement
on combine.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [RE-VOTE #3] adoption of mod_combine subproject
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:13:39 -0500
From: William A. Rowe Jr. <wr...@rowe-clan.net>
To: legal-disc...@apache.org
On 4/4/2012 7:52 AM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
>
> On Apr 3, 2012, at 9:37 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote:
>>
>> I will absolutely not shirk my own responsibility, which in this matter, is
>> neither the responsibility of a committer placing code at the ASF, an officer
>> acting under the direction of the BoD, nor a a director of the ASF. Which is
>> to say, my entire responsibility as a member of the project and the
>> foundation
>> consisted of bringing the concern to the chair of the project and VP Legal,
>> and let you all have your fun. I'm done with this dialog. Cheers.
>
> I will be honest: I have no idea what this whole debate is about.
> From the vote within the PMC, it's clear that the consensus is
> to fold the code in, that we are satisfied that we are covered,
> IP-wise, due to Graham's iCLA on file as well as other guarantees
> noted in the (long) thread regarding the code submission.
> So what is the problem?? That someone doesn't like the result
> of the vote and is hoping to have it overturned, somehow??
>
> I also fail to see how this codebase is any different from other
> modules which we've folded in from "outside" like mod_proxy_html
> and Paul's various heartbeat/cluster stuff which came in with hardly
> any debate and certainly not dragging legal into it all...
In December I pointed out, owing to my own ignorance, that the submission
needed to follow the incubator IP clearance process. You *agreed* with the
comment somewhere along the way. Checking off that box appeared necessary
to us both. There were other issues, nothing to do with legal@ which you
are bringing up above, but that's all distraction from the purpose of this
thread here at legal@
And then...
Roy answered, No, Asked and Answered; we do not follow that *incubator*
IP clearance process for new submissions authored by existing committers.
The PMC simply accepts the code based on its own judgement that its own
committers are correctly handling the IP concerns.
And then...
Of course, Sam said that legal provided no such guidance. I shoved this
all back to legal-private and said "figure it out, then explain it to us".
Sam suggests that revised legal IP clearance requirements, as a matter
of policy, across top level projects, is sufficiently described by;
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/201204.mbox/%3C4F7C3832.4050509%40intertwingly.net%3E
So, simply time for spring cleaning. I've asked Sam to document one
specific legal policy and have gained this reference email post, and
will ensure that neither the httpd.a.o or apr.a.o dev pages refer to
other older, stale ip clearance policies. Certainly won't try to clean
it up across the whole foundation, but at least everyone has this same
email documentation to refer back to.
In the meantime, on the referenced bug, there was no objection in 7 days
to Graham's claim, so Graham will proceed and PMC considers this resolved
and this thread is ended. As Roy argued in the first place, and Sam now
finally concurs, the external IP Clearance process was never applicable
to committers with icla's. One would suppose the IP Clearance process
remains applicable only for multiparty or code-grant based submissions,
just not for single party, author-contributed icla-based submissions.
--- Begin Message ---
On 04/03/2012 10:43 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote:
On 4/3/2012 9:33 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
The ASF goes through great pains to ensure that (for example) every
commit results in an email to a mailing list that PMC is expected to
monitor. When mistakes happen (note I said when, not if), it is a
failing not only of the committer but of the PMC. Every time somebody
runs a RAT report and identifies a problem, that is a problem that was
missed previously. Somebody committed that change. Every PMC member
wasn't doing their job monitoring commits.
Isolated mistakes that are promptly addressed are not a problem. A
pattern of mistakes will prompt action, first from the Legal Affairs
committee, and ultimately by the board.
- Sam Ruby
When I don't quote the top quote, I'm sure we agree. Let's document that,
and precisely what it means to provide IP intake oversight at the PMC level,
without involving other committees for every common sense addition, and put
that document (with generous doses of common sense) to all of the PMC's to
enforce? Is there another legal PMC member who wants to act as recorder
in the coming week?
The part that we appear to agree on is (a) that the conditions that
committers are expected to meet are documented in the ICLA, (b) that it
is not impossible for people to make mistakes, and therefore (c) the PMC
needs to be vigilant. Apparently you feel that something in these
simple statements isn't common sense, and needs to be documented. But
you aren't willing to document it, and are looking for somebody else to
do it for you.
Meanwhile, I am not going to make the judgment call as to whether this
particular individual is trustworthy and followed all of the necessary
procedures. I don't have the necessary context, that approach doesn't
scale, and that's not what delegation is all about. The responsibility,
authority, and accountability for that decision rests with the PMC.
If you feel a compelling need for documentation in order to proceed on
this specific contribution, how about you simply point people to this
post as it appears in the email archives?
- Sam Ruby
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