Hey all,
The OSGeo board met last Friday to consider my proposal for the Geotools
Copyright Assignment document. They took some decisions which they
needed to take and decided, going forward, the process should be:
1) we (geotools) finalize the document wording
2) we send the doc (?via Frank) to the lawyers for review
3) ?(I'm not sure about this) we resubmit the revised document
to the board for final approval
after which we will have to sign and return the copyright assignment
form.
Chris Holmes has volunteered to take our draft to the lawyers and get it
fully approved. If we push a little hopefully we can get this done in
the next few weeks. After that, the PMC will have to adopt the strategy
and then we can finally lobby to try to get everyone on board and signed
up.
However, two issues have come up that suggest that Geotools the project
adopt a more complete strategy than simply signing the single copyright
assignment document. First, the copyright assignment document will not
deal with submarine patents. Second, some legal systems only allow you
to assign copyright on past productions rather than on "all work donated
to geotools". So, while getting everyone to sign the Copyright
Assignment form should cover us for all past contributions, covering
future contributions implies a more sophisticated strategy.
To deal with these issues, I propose that we adopt a slightly more
complex strategy.
To cover past contributions, we get as many of us as possible to sign
the copyright assignment document. That, plus a refresh of the
provenance review and some champagne should get us to graduate!
To cover future contributions, we adopt the following strategy:
We require, to maintain or gain svn access after a cutoff date
(say Oct 1st), that all contributors sign:
1) The copyright assignment document to OSGeo,
2) A geotools only document that commits those with svn
access to behave responsibly: to deal with the community
politely, to deal with svn respectfully, i.e. follow
developer guidelines) and make only legal and clean
commits (i.e. third-party code is well documented, no
submarine patents)...
3) A yearly renewal document of the copyright assignment
covering the past year's commits.
while this involves more paperwork, the strategy should provide as solid
a legal foundation for our code as we possibly can create. Also, an
added advantage of the yearly renewal is to automatically triage
inactive contributors.
Perhaps the PMC can discuss this during one of the upcomming meetings.
And hopefully there will be more information, perhaps the Copyright
Assignment document itself, in a couple of weeks,
ciao,
--adrian
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express
Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take
control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now.
http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/
_______________________________________________
Geotools-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
