Hello all, I was more involved than anyone in those "years" pursing the CLA for ElasticGeo and so I hope you'll tolerate my long-winded comments here.
As the maintainer of ElasticGeo I am trying again to contribute the project as Elasticsearch community modules in GeoTools and (if successful) GeoServer. Previous attempts have failed because of issues involving getting a signed CLA. It's been slow because the CLA is a legal document and it required signature by the U.S. Government. Now I am no longer a U.S. Government employee and am trying again since all my contributions are covered under my OSGeo ICLA. But now the issue is with requiring CLA signatures from the other ElasticGeo contributors, where at least one of these would still be subject to the Government CLA signature requirement. I am trying to get the project moved under GeoTools/GeoServer for better maintenance, visibility and integration with the developer and user communities built around those projects. ElasticGeo has been stable but even light maintenance is more difficult for me as the only current maintainer because I have moved on from the organization. As a result the project is in danger of becoming fractured or orphaned despite having a small but consistent community of users and contributors. Regarding the license and header discrepancy in the ElasticGeo repository, the GeoTools component (gt-elasticsearch) is LGPL since it includes classes like https://github.com/ngageoint/elasticgeo/blob/master/gt-elasticsearch/src/main/java/mil/nga/giat/data/elasticsearch/FilterToElastic.java that were based on GeoTools classes. Any new files that were created like https://github.com/ngageoint/elasticgeo/blob/master/gt-elasticsearch/src/main/java/mil/nga/giat/data/elasticsearch/ElasticAggregation.java have the public domain header since those parts were public domain. More officially the ElasticGeo licensing is stated in the README as follows: "Software source code previously released under an open source license and then modified by NGA staff is considered a "joint work" (see 17 USC 101); it is partially copyrighted, partially public domain, and as a whole is protected by the copyrights of the non-government authors and must be released according to the terms of the original open source license.". In the GeoTools MR fork all files have been updated with the OSGeo copyright headers. The one thing I haven't been comfortable with is the idea of rebasing out attribution to other contributors just because they can't sign the CLA. I was hoping since ElasticGeo is an established open source project released under LGPL (gt-elasticsearch) and GPL (gs-elasticsearch) that the contributions could be recognized as having satisfied the intent of the OSGeo CLA in this case. More generally though I do like the proposal in https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/GSIP-186. My opinion is certainly based on my experience. But one thing I wonder is if the CLA process is something that other open source communities are continuing to follow or if there have been any alternative processes that have been more successful in protecting projects and members while also being as inclusive as possible in a diverse and evolving community of open source developers. On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 10:39 AM Jody Garnett <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks Andrea, sorry to be so careful with this stuff ... too much time as > osgeo incubation chair. > > And as you can see that elasticgeo is exactly the kind of "mess" the US > government makes trying to use public and open source licenses. > > I can try using the osgeo board to kick the NGA again but they are a train > wreck at present. > > I should be clear that we as individuals can "fix" by copying the code and > placing it into our repository; it is the government employees who cannot > fix. On the bright side the public domain part means we can copy it into > our code and put it under any license we want (including our GPL+Exception). > -- > Jody Garnett > > > On Thu, 23 Jan 2020 at 08:06, Andrea Aime <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 5:03 PM Andrea Aime <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> I think the proposal is explicit about requiring module here... but I >>> >> >> I've updated the page to be more explicit, can you check? Feel free to >> update the wording directly to make it clearer >> >> Cheers >> Andrea >> >> == >> >> GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit >> http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == Ing. Andrea Aime @geowolf >> Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. 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