You all seem to be spinning your wheels a little on the copyright
issue, so I thought I try to give you a little push:
1) The copyright owner must be the organization, *not* individual
contributors. This eliminates all the "getting permission"
requirements you seem to be stuck on.
2) The idea that the people making bigger contributions will have some
special rights to control what happens in the organization or to the
code is completely bogus. The members of the organization will govern
what happens *as a group*. If they decide that Uli or Anthony or
anyone else becomes more trouble than they're worth, they'll vote to
strip that person of all rights and responsibilities and there's not a
damn thing the individual will be able to do about it.
3) The contributions of patches and additions must all be to the
organization, and must require the submitter give up any personal
rights to the contributed code whether the organization decides to use
the code or not. This should be explicitly specified in the
organizational charter. If you want extra protection against
lawsuits, require all contributions to be made through a WWW page
where the submitter has to read this requirement and click on an "I
accept" button.
4) This leaves open the issue of the organizational charter, which is
really the first of the 2 things MetaCard Corporation needs to see
established before getting involved with the UI development project
(e.g., the MetaCard license contribution). I recommend you move on to
this part, since it will be the organization that votes on what
license to use. My previous recommendation, which still holds, was to
choose members of the organization by vote of the existing members
(majority rules). Since the voting CGI project seems to have died, I
recommend you just appoint a vote counter, and everyone email that
person the list of who they think should be in the organization. The
vote counter will digest that list and announce the membership roster.
The members can then move on to approving additional members who may
not have made the first cut, establishing and voting on
offices/responsibilities (if necessary), and finally voting on the
license agreement.
Regards,
Scott
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Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
