Thank you very much for the information/clarifications (Jukka & Gord, as well)! :-)
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Jukka Zitting <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Brent Lintner <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I was wondering: once the project's codebase is officially contributed > > (i.e. pushed) to an ASF git repo, what does this mean for Copyright? > > > > Does the Copyright change from this point onward? Or will it (or should > it) > > remain as Copyright Research In Motion? > > In the legal sense, i.e. who owns the original copyrights to the code, > nothing changes - the code that was and hopefully will be written by > RIM remains under its copyright. The only thing that's different is > the license that RIM and other Ripple contributors grant to the ASF to > distribute their code under ALv2 or other similar terms. > > On the other hand, what does change is this copyright/licensing > information is documented in source headers and other metadata like > the LICENSE and NOTICE files in the source tree. See > http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html as the authoritative > source of Apache policy on this. > > In short, we'll need to change all Ripple source headers to the > generic Apache header instead of listing any specific copyrights. The > rationale behind this is that over time we hope many different people > and companies to contribute to these files, and managing detailed > copyright records of all those contributions is a waste of time as the > information is already recorded in the version control and issue > tracking systems. > > The Cordova NOTICE files don't explicitly mention the copyrights of > various contributors as keeping that information around adds extra > complexity to downstream distributors (the ALv2 requires them to pass > on the details in NOTICE). In some other projects though the original > contributor of a codebase has an entry in the NOTICE file. If RIM > wants something like that, an extra line like "Based on source code > originally developed by Research In Motion (http://www.rim.com/)" > could be added to the Ripple NOTICE along with the standard Apache > bits. > > > ..but I am still not 100% sure, regarding our situation, and would > > appreciate any insight into this, and if this is something we will need > to > > do after contributing the code. :-) > > Updating the source headers and other licensing metadata can be done > either before or after the codebase gets migrated to Apache. The only > real deadline is that getting these licensing bits in order is a > precondition to cutting the first release of Apache Ripple. > > BR, > > Jukka Zitting > -- Brent
