Thanks for the reply Jason. Sorry it took so long to follow up. > I am the originator of the ArgoUML name and logo. > I also own argouml.org and argouml.com.
As you may have inferred from Linus' note, he's pursuing more formal organization of the ArgoUML project, most likely under an umbrella non-profit organization such as the Software Freedom Conservancy to provide the benefits of incorporation without all the overhead. If we were to achieve this successfully, would you be willing to assign the (unregistered) trademark and the web sites to the organization? Of course the organization would pick up the expense for the domain registration as well. The $1500 we have coming in from Google should pay for at least a few years. :-) > > 2. IP Provenance - > > Frankly, we did not do a good job of this, and now I think > that the cat is out of the bag and cannot really be put back > in. Much of the code is marked with a copyright by the > Regents of the University of California, but contributors > have not officially signed it over to UC Regents and it is > probably infeasible to go back and get all contributors to > sign one now. Cats are difficult, but not impossible, to get into bags. Although the headers say "copyright Regents," as you probably know, under U.S. law, in the absence of a copyright assignment, the copyright is actually held by the individual authors. Other countries have similar laws for works created there. A strong argument could be made, however, that they've given implicit permission to distribute their works under the terms of the version of the BSD license in the standard ArgoUML header. This may make it less critical to go back and get agreements from all previous authors. It'd still probably be a good idea to formalize the conditions under which we expect code to be contributed and perhaps back it up with a contributor's agreement a la Apache http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt or Eclipse. > > 3. License - The BSD license is certainly flexible, but it has some > > drawbacks too. > > I don't want to go too far to try to > prevent forks, especially not commercial forks. Use/reuse of the open source code, of which a fork is one particular style of use, isn't of interest unless the code remains relevant and useful. Relicensing is just one option for encouraging continued improvement of the commons so that it remains valuable. Another option would be to find a way to significantly increase the amount of contributed developer effort through other means. > There have also been many contributors who did give back ... It would be great to document some success cases to encourage others to give back too. Can you name some examples? When I was looking, all I found were the Poseidons and MyEclipses of the world. Speaking of relicensing, the current copyright header/license seems to be different from what most sources quote as the "standard" BSD license (eg http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php ) and I'm not sure why. The version that we're using doesn't seem to afford the explicit protection to contributors that the other does and it also, of course, claims that the Regents own the copyright. I think it would be preferable to use the version that offers more protection for the contributors, even if it's minimal, and which assigns the copyright to the ArgoUML project. Presumably the original UC student and employee contributors explicitly assigned their copyrights to the Regents as part of their employee/student agreements. Any chance of getting those rights assigned to the ArgoUML "foundation" if and when it gets set up? Even if we can't do that, switching to the header with the improved contributors language would be useful. Who is our primary representative to the UC Regents? Tom --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
