> Scott: 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:
Adrian: Thank you Scott. Your input is greatly appreciated.
> Scott: 1) The copyright owner must be the organization, *not* individual
> contributors. This eliminates all the "getting permission"
> requirements you seem to be stuck on.
Adrian: It seems that we will need to look into becoming an official
organisation then.
> Scott: 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.
Adrian: This is what I'd like to see. Besides, it is impossible to
determine the value of any one contribution.
> Scott: 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.
Adrian: Agreed.
> Scott: 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.
Adrian: We should probably start with Anthony's draft constitution for the
UFP and work from there. It covered many of the issues that need to be
dealt with.
