Hi, Dennis,
On 9/12/2011 22:37, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
I want to connect some dots between terms-of-use and licenses.
The terms-of-use, such as<http://openoffice.org/terms_of_use>, linked at the
bottom of the OpenOffice.org pages do not provide a license to those pages. The
terms of use provide disclaimers on behalf of the host and set conditions that apply
to contributions that might be made by an user of the site. But the presence of the
terms of use on the bottom of a page is independent of whether or not the page in
question is partly or entirely such a contribution. I expect that the same would be
true for any terms-of-use that Apache provides on the bottoms of web pages that are
produced as part of Apache projects.
The fact that the check-out of the version-controlled form of (most of) those pages
via SVN does not carry any notices does not mean they are not under someone's
copyright. There is also no indication of them being under any license such as that
described in [1:<http://www.openoffice.org/license.html>], however.
Now, I don't think anyone (or at least, not a lot of anyones) will be disturbed
to see us preserving the OpenOffice.org site and its operation, as well as
incubating the site into a form that aligns with the incubation of the
development process and production of more releases. Even if the site is not
covered by the SGA, I doubt that there will be a problem so long as there is
deliberate care and accountability for the origin of the material.
My appeal on this thread is for our exercise of due care in making that
transition, and respecting the concerns of the ASF for how that is done and any
specific determinations that are made by the legal folks.
I have other concerns in how a safe landing of OpenOffice.org is achieved, as I
am sure others have as well. Nevertheless, this thread and my specific
concrete concern here is solely about substitution of terms and addition of
copyright and license notices on materials as served from web sites,
particularly without any legal review. (The branding issue is an interesting
separate matter. I hope there are ways to mitigate that for material that did
not originate in the podling.)
- Dennis
<snip>
Ah! I think the penny finally dropped. Are you confusing the wiki
content with the web content?
Admittedly, the ownership and license situation on the wiki is
troublesome. With anyone able to sign up and start writing ...
OTOH, the web pages are and always were under a CMS, with write-access
limited to something very like "committers". Absent information to the
contrary, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the authors were
Sun/Oracle employees, doing their jobs. Hence, the only question for
legal is whether that content was included in the SGA, which it should
have been. Note that when Oracle took over, their legal staff had no
problem with the re-branding (<sarcasm> "Oracle pwns you!" </sarcasm>)
that Oracle did.
In short, we do not have a problem here.
--
/tj/
