Woot - progress! Thanks so much Adrian/Frank/Chris :-) > 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. > Nifty; I think the feedback from lawyers (thanks Chris) is mostly what we were waiting for. > 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. > Gak :-( > 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. > Okay that does make some sense (I was expecting worse). I would change 3) to be a renewal document of copyright assignment on each major release (happens slightly less than once a year currently). > 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, > Sweet - thanks so much all of you, Jody
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