Arnulf Christl wrote:
What do folks think about software Copyright ownership? OSGeo could suggest that project steering committees move the Copyright of their software under the hood of OSGeo as GeoTools and others already did. In some cases the respective project steering committees might not be able to do such a thing because they do not own it in the first place. Is that a good situation?
Arnulf, While I would prefer copyright in OSGeo projects to reside with OSGeo for simplicity and uniform management, I am concerned that the paperwork to do this properly would be a barrier to participation. I am also concerned that some developers would be concerned about OSGeo having the right to relicense their software - for instance, possibly moving code from LGPL/GPL to more permissive open source license - contrary to their wishes when they contributed the code. I am also doubtful of our ability to convincingly get all the code of some projects assigned to OSGeo. An incomplete job does not seem much better than not having bothered at all. So, I'm on the side of "business as usual" which is that it is up to the project to decide how they want to handle this as long as things are handled responsibly and the results are under an open source license. I would note that despite some cloudiness in the MySQL world, it remains clear that the code remains available to use under the open source license it was originally published under (GPL I think?). I think that is the key guarantee. Best regards, -- ---------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss