Hi,
Dieter Wimberger schrieb:
Richard, Felix:
I think that the ICLA I signed and sent to the Apache Foundation
Secretary cleary states the legal terms of the contribution.
Given paragraph 2. Grant of Copyright License, I am granting the Apache
Foundation and all recipients of the software distributed by the
Foundation an irrevocable right to reproduce, prepare derivative works
of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the
contribution.
In legal terms, to my understanding, I will still be owner of my
original contribution and can do as I please with it (e.g. grant another
license).
So I do also understand. Now, in this respect the code in ASF SVN
repository is kind of a derivative work now AFAIUI belong to the ASF.
Now, given that the contribution is mainly code, I would simply suggest
that my @author tag in the javadoc of the corresponding files and
derivatives is retained. The code and especially derivatives should
actually be placed under Apache License and ASF copyright; I guess this
is also what you do with the committers code contributions, or?
Yes. Except that in ASF project we generally (at least the very few
projects I have some insight in) do not keep the @author tags because
they tend to be outdated over time and do not reflect the correct
information.
The most appropriate information with respect to authoring of code is
the SVN logs, which record who committed what. Of course there is a
break in this case with respect to me committing the code.
What I would suggest in this case, would be to mark the files as
"originally authored by ...." or something like that.
Beside the code, I think a list of contributors and committers seems to
be the best way to give credits; this is also the way it has been done
in other Apache projects I have contributed to.
To give an example, the commons-collections project seems to keep their
developers (= comitters) and contributors in the POM file, using a
section like:
<developers>
...
<developer>
<id>fmeschbe</id>
<name>Felix Meschberger</name>
</developer>
...
</developers>
<contributors>
...
<contributor>
<name>Dieter Wimberger</name>
</contributor>
...
</contributors>
Probably this is the best way to handle this in the right place and be
able to generate something from it (opposed to an unstructured NOTICE
text file).
This would be a good idea. But we don't maintain the developers and
contributors in the pom file(s) - maybe simply because we do not
generate the site from the pom files.
Instead I added Dieter's Contribution on our contributions page [1]. I
just realized that this page is not referred to on the site. So I put a
link on our Community page for this. Should be synchronized within an
hour or so.
Regards
Felix
[1] http://felix.apache.org/site/felix-r4-contributions.html
