Arnulf Christl wrote:
Cameron Shorter wrote:
Good processes + no money is an acceptable strategy so long as we
have consciously made this decision and everyone is aware of the
strategy.
Hello,
keeping budgets low already is a corporate strategy of OSGeo as far as
I am concerned. I am eager to extend this strategy to Legal Support.
We are not here to fight legal wars but to further Free and Open
Source Software.
Odd; not what I signed up for. For me an open source foundation is there
to protect and promote. Without both I am stuck shopping around to other
foundations for help; a bit of a waste of my time.
Whenever someone does want to pick on us we should have a solid ground
and we have this with the incubation guidelines as they are. All that
has to happen then will then happen, not now.
I do not believe that; the job of the first projects through the
incubation process is to set the guidelines - as such they are still
very much a work in progress.
As long as we have more or less empty pockets and do not aim at
leveraging money as a major facilitator against anybody and we
continue to build our brand as being a straight group of spatial FOSS
addicts there is little reason to get at us from the legal side
anyway. What would you get? A bad reputation, little or no money at
all and a large bunch of really angry people. Hooray, lets go sue some
Foundations.
Depends what you are after; as Paul's recent blog shows patents and so
forth are a very strange chess game and these older open source projects
are a large body of prior art. We have already had to remove code
violating patents from GeoTools; and I trust we will need to do so again.
My personal opinion is that a lot of the discussion is beside the
point and we are oftentimes confusing copyright, ownership,
originator's rights, branding and what really makes up a project - the
community around it. We should get a lawyer only when we need one as
we cannot anticipate in which context we will need her. Please never
ever be IANAL again, I am tired of reading that phrase.
Fair enough; on a pragmatic front the only reason I care about this
stuff at all is because I hate getting email to the effect of "We did a
review 6 months ago and felt your project was too risky". I am trying to
be proactive about contributors fears; so that all this legal stuff
stops separating the community.
Call me simplistic but I am still of the strong opinion that all we
need to do is get some GeoTools developers go through the project
files, change the Copyright to point at OSGeo and commit. My only
concern was that the developers might feel they lose control and OSGeo
could go berserk and sell the code Copyright to some big bad corporation.
Actually we are ready to do just that; we have a "change proposal page"
to that effect sitting there ready to go. The GeoTools PMC approved this
direction over a year ago.
What we don't want to do is inflict a codebase on the OSGeo board
without them feeling comfortable about what they are signing up for.
I think it simply cannot. And even if it did it wouldn't make any
difference as anybody can always fork the last GNUed one and go for
it. Can we get over it, please and let GeoTools graduate?
This discussion; and definition of scope; is exactly what the GeoTools
incubation process is supposed to be contributing to the foundation. Yes
we could graduate at any time (simply by changing our policy so that
contributors retain copyright - like half the OSGeo projects); that
would be a disservice to the next project through the gates.
Cheers,
Jody
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