Here are my notes from the conference call for any who's interested. As you can see, the situation hasn't changed.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tom Morris <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 6:57 AM Subject: DRAFT- ArgoUML license change conference call notes - 19 Dec 2007 To: Linus Tolke <[email protected]> Here's a quick draft from my notes. It needs more review, but I won't be able to do that until tonight (at least 12 hrs from now). Tom ---------- Linus Tolke <[email protected]>, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <[email protected]>, [email protected], [email protected] Attendees: ArgoUML: Linus Tolke, project leader; Tom Morris, developer Software Freedom Conservancy: Bradley Kuhn, president; Richard Fontana, staff lawyer; Karen Sandler, staff lawyer Meeting Purpose: Review potential legal issues with relicensing ArgoUML under a different license than the current one Provenance of Intellectual Property - Although the meeting was nominally about what would be needed to switch to a new license, the lawyers were concerned about the provenance of the existing source code, so we spent a good portion of the call discussing this. Because our copyright headers list the University of California (UC) Regents as the copyright holder, but there's never been an explicit copyright grant by the majority of our contributors, it was suggested that a mailing be down to all contributors of record with a listing of their contributions (CVS/SVN log), stating our assumption that they held a valid copyright to these contributions and that they granted license rights to those contributions, and asking for positive confirmation (or perhaps just objections?). It is assumed that all UC staff and student contributions (pre-open source project) have clear provenance based on employment agreements and student agreements granting ownership to the UC Regents. Copyright ownership - The "ArgoUML team" isn't a valid copyright owner since it isn't a legal entity. It would be possible to assign the SFC as the owner, but they currently have no infrastructure in place to manage this. The alternative is to have the individual authors maintain ownership (as is the default under copyright law). Copyright assignment to the SFLC by individual developers may add some liability protection for the developers. Relicensing - There is no legal conflict between the current BSD license and any of the possible future licenses that we discussed (EPL, LGPL, GPL with Classpath exception) and there is no legal reason to prefer one over the other. The most important recommendation from the lawyers in choosing a new license is to read it carefully and make sure it needs the project. The each contain their own little subtleties and quirks. Eclipse Public License notes - It contains a choice of law clause saying that New York state Ohloh lists 58 contributors from its SVN scan. At least three of those are pseudo accounts (root, httpd, tigrisc), another four only have a single commit, and eleven have less than ten commits each (although a single commit could consist of an entire working plugin module). ------------------------------------------------------ http://argouml.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=450&dsMessageId=1403290 To unsubscribe from this discussion, e-mail: [[email protected]]. To be allowed to post to the list contact the mailing list moderator, email: [[email protected]]
