Hey all, A quick summary to get everyone on the same page. This is my understanding from working on various free software projects over the past ten years, and applies only to US law.
Under US law *anyone* who contributes (a 'contributor') to a joint work has joint copyright status unless there is an explicit document somewhere that states otherwise. This means that if some group can show that they contributed to a file, they have a joint copyright to that file. (It is possible to create a derived file which formally removes all the contributions from a particular 'contributor' but this takes careful, line-by-line tracking.) For the sake of Geotools, it would be very useful for the header to have the names of *all* these contributors. "Contributors" in this case is generally the programmer, unless that person has been doing paid work, in which case the copyright may be owned by the programmer, the company, or the client depending on the contract formulation. Note that what the header says is irrelevant in the US --- in that country no formal claim to copyright is required for the validity of that copyright. Having a complete header, then, is useful for GeoTools to know who the joint right holders are; it possibly also serves as a necessary assertion of copyright in other countries. The only way to reduce or alter the number of copyright holders is to have a formal document (or possibly a 'click' through procedure) through which a contributor assigns their rights to another entity. This may be the case for the volunteers and PMC members. They may have assigned their rights to the "GeoTools PMC" in which case the latter group gets joint ownership with all the remaining 'contributors' who have not yet formally handed over their rights. Does someone, possibly James?, have these letters? If so, the letters will eventually need to be with OsGeo. It might also be good to have a high quality scan of each letter somewhere in the code base so that they remain as close to the code as possible and the originals matter less. Joint copyright is generally considered a good thing for free software. The one thing it makes very difficult is to re-license the software since this requires the consent of all the joint copyright holders. For example, the free implementation of the Java class libraries, the Classpath project, is considering moving a lot of code from the LGPL to the Apache license but cannot simply do this in one go because the number of contributors is so large. Again, joint copyright is not a problem of any kind until GeoTools decides to change license. The good part about this difficulty is that all the contributors can be sure that the license will probably not change. Martin: On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 22:40 +1100, Martin Desruisseaux wrote: > * The GeodeticCalculator class contains code from NOAA, which is an US > government agency I > believe. The NOAA code is already flagged by comments in the source file > (with the FTP adress > where is come from). I have been unable to find a license on NOAA web > site, other than a sentence > saying that the code is in the public domain. Unless stated formally otherwise (and possibly even in that case), all code created by the Federal Government of the US is in the public domain. If you can get to the code, it's yours to do *whatever* you want with. If you choose to commit that into GeoTools and license it under the LGPL, you are perfectly allowed to. However, it doesn't hurt, and is quite nice to add a small acknowledgment in the header: "Portions of this file were obtained from .... and are in the Public Domain according to... For the formal language, see the intro to Bryce Nordgren's primer which even states the dominant law to be applied. The PMC might want to develop a standard template for such outside sources of code/data. > > * Referencing-3D would contains code from > http://earth-info.nima.mil/GandG/wgs84/gravitymod/. > The only "license-like" info I found up to date is the sentence "Both the > EGM96 and the WGS 84 > geoid height files and coefficient files have associated software and > documents. They are > available for unlimited distribution" in the above-cited page. If anyone > as suggestion about > how I should work the LICENSE.txt file in the referencing-3D module, it > would be appreciated. This sounds like a bad way used by NIMA to state that the files are in the public domain. Again, US government code is generally in the public domain unless you see a strong statement otherwise. --adrian _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list Geotools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
