On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 00:59 +1000, Michael Bedward wrote: > or might it be safer for the contributor to put their code under BSD > (for instance) ? > > On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 11:01 PM, Andrea Aime <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Adrian, Jody, is public domain a good way to accept patches from > > someone that did not sign a contribution agreement to gt2? > >
Contributing bug fixes as public domain code would be nice but I'm not sure it's possible. As far as I know, despite a lawyer correcting me on this issue but without sufficient evidence to be convincing, there is no actual way to place work in the public domain. Simply stating you are putting work in the public domain *might* be enough to avoid being sued under rules of estoppel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel) but that's hard to be sure. The BSD license would actually conflict with geotools policy since we would have to keep the code itself under the BSD license which would pollute the code base. We *could* distribute geotools under the lgpl but the header would have to stay around the code fix. If the bug fix is trivial, we can use it with no worries. If the bug fix is small but non trivial we could probably get away with including it, if the code were committed with a "placed in the public domain" line at the top. We should probably then add a line at the top of the file explaining that there is code in function xxxx taken from bug yyyy ... However, the best course of action is to sign the committer agreement. It was written to be fairly easy to buy in to. --adrian ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Geotools-gt2-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-gt2-users
