Hello all, While drafting possible agreements, the difficulty of defining what 'Geotools' is now leads me to suggest that we separate out the idea of transferring the Geotools project to OSGeo from the idea of each of us granting OSGeo special rights to the code.
This is a minor change which does not influence the choice we must make to our overall strategy of copyright assignment, exclusive licensing, or doing nothing. This minor change only involves the documents and language we will use. The current documents which exist simply don't work. The agreements cover all contributions to OSGeo but they can't accommodate a developer making contributions to two different OSGeo projects with different license/copyright strategies. (Note this is a problem other foundations tend not to have). The documents also have other problems I have detailed elsewhere. My previous strategy was to have a single contribution agreement document which would serve two purposes: give OSGeo special rights and get from OSGeo assurances that they would treat those rights wisely. To do that in a single document we end up needing complex language to define 'geotools the project', 'geotools the body of work' and 'contributions'. The 'project' is 'that body of work that is ... and is managed by the pmc...' The 'body of work' includes confluence, jira, svn, maven repository, geotools.fr docs, sourceforge binaries. The 'commits' are contributions to those servers, but only those that are part of the 'body of work'. For example, we have to speak of commits to sourceforge but only those related to Geotools, commits to the geotools space of the refractions svn server, documentation transfers to geotools.fr but only related to the 'project.' We can go this route but it makes for a long, ugly document. My new proposal is to first create the 'project' as a formal structure of OSGeo and then to define contributions as additions to that project. The first part will 'create' a formal Geotools project as that body of work which is an effort fostered by OSGeo, managed by a well defined PSC, with the control of the www.geotools.org domain name. Legally, we need to establish that project as something that cannot be confused with any other project. OSGeo would formally create this project as an effort of its own and during this creation, OSGeo would guarantee to be a good custodian no matter whether its role is as a regular licensee, an exclusive licensee or a copyright holder. The second part could then define our contributions as those specifically to the Geotools project. The result will be to have shorter, cleaner, clearer documents. Let's discuss this during tomorrow's meeting. --adrian ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
