Hey all,
Rumors brought by grey mice to the basement where I work appear to
suggest that the OSGeo board accepted the proposed copyright assignment
agreement (hereinafter CAA). The mice were too interested in the cheese
used to bribe them to tell us anything else about what happened at that
meeting so I don't know anything about the discussion which occurred.
Regardless, it appears we are free to control our own destiny towards
graduation.
There are several steps which need to happen and I suggest that we lay
out a schedule for each of them so we can meet our incubation mentor's
90 day deadline. (Cameron, when is day 89?)
Would it make sense for two of the PMC members to be placed in charge of
such a schedule to keep us on track?
The steps as I see them are as follows.
I. Agree on a plan:
------------------
The last informal discussion I saw resulted in a general consensus that
everyone present would rather use the OSGeo copyright contribution
agreement to assign copyright to OSGeo rather than work with the FSF.
The latter had been a possibility recently. We really need to form a
common front on this aspect to get essentially everyone on board the
direction we choose.
A. We need to confirm that we are going this route and address
any residual concerns any of those who are willing to assign
copyright may still have.
B. We need to decide on how we will treat future contributors.
If we are planning to move SVN to OSGeo, do we grant access to
that SVN only to those who have signed? If not, we need to be
very clear about how a contributor needs to track their
copyright over the files they touch.
II. Invite all past contributors to assign copyright:
----------------------------------------------------
The group of people who already plan to participate need to compose a
letter explaining what is happening, why, laying out the benefits and
generally showing that by assigning copyright we will achieve world
peace, place free geospatial software in everyone's pockets, and reform
the planet to be tide-free, perfectly spheroidal and with only long-lat
coordinates. The letter should also explain how to play along: where to
get the form, where to send it, how to know when it has been
countersigned and accepted.
Since part of the intent of this work is to allow OSGeo to re-license
the code one day, it might be worth mentioning the fact that Java itself
has moved to GPL plus classpath exception and therefore we might need to
follow that move someday.
C. We must compose a letter, we must get an authoritative list
of emails of past contributors, send the letter out to all the
past contributors and attempt to get a statement of intent
(will/won't sign) from each so we can know where everyone
stands.
III. Torture committers to get docs signed, sealed and delivered.
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The ultimate threat to miss access to a 'future, better svn' may not be
enough to get our lazy selves to mail the docs.
D. Form a 'torture committee' able and willing to cause intense
psychological torture, public mockery and general abuse to
achieve our goals.
IV. Setup the OSGeo SVN space:
------------------------------
>From a quick look, it seems we need to first all get nicks in the OSGeo
namespace using this page:
http://www.osgeo.org/osgeo_userid
then we can use the same nick in the SVN space.
We need to ask to setup an OSGeo SVN space and grant commit rights to
those who have signed the contributor agreement (and others if we want
as well although that would probably require another legal document
saying they will play nice and not pollute the codebase).
For now, that space will remain empty or temporary. People could attempt
test commits to show their access rights work; we would then wipe the
space when we actually transfer the SVN.
E. We need to have someone responsible for getting this space
setup and having a way to grant commit rights as the letters
land at OSGeo.
IV. Clean up the headers on trunk:
---------------------------------
We can't start this step until we have all signed the copyright
assignment document. Then the question arises how we want to go about
automating this as much as possible.
The situation today is that the headers are WRONG. The line that says
(c) PMC is incorrect since that entity does not exist, it cannot hold
copyright. The legal situation today, DESPITE what the headers may say,
is that each contributor of non-trivial changes to any file holds a
joint copyright to that file. The best assumption is that all the
usernames in the svn log are those who have copyright on the file.
Essentially,
svn log FILE | grep '^r[0-9]'
gives the full list of copyright holders, except that for some of those
the copyright will rest with their employers.
Somehow we need to come up with a strategy and possilby automated
scripts to help us with the cleanup.
Jody proposed some new headers here:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Gradudate+from+OSGeo
but I don't think that stuff is right yet. Especially the (c) PMC needs
to be REMOVED since it is WRONG.
F. We need to do a header cleanup sprint, possibly coordinated
with the svn cleanup work.
That's all I see for now. I'm sure I've missed something,
--adrian
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