Dear all,
I actually had this email ready yesterday, but yesterday was a sad day
here, definitively not the mood for big anouncements. Here is what we
wanted to say.
*Happy new year to everyone!* We are considering a few *important
changes* regarding *Orfeo ToolBox*.We believe these changes will have a
very positive impact on our open source software, however we would like
to ensure that you (the Orfeo ToolBox community!) are fine with them. We
therefore set up a *dedicated page
<http://wiki.orfeo-toolbox.org/index.php/Discussion_about_licence_change,_Contributor_Licence_Agreement,_and_PSC>
on our wiki* (also note the ongoing wiki cleanup), so as to gather your
feedback.*If you would like to make a comment or suggestion, please
write it on the wiki page* in the appropriate discussion section.
Hereafter are the three major changes we envision.
Changing license to Apache v2.0
<http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>
For quite some time now we have been considering a change of license for
OTB, to adopt the Apache v2.0 licence
<http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>. The rational for this
change is as follows :
Copyleft is a very good protection for open-source software in general,
since it ensures that it will remain open, but in our remote sensing
world it can also lesser the dissemination of our software. Many time we
heard of situations were OTB was considered by institutions or private
companies for their projects and has been wiped off the table because
they (or their clients or partners) wanted to distribute the resulting
software under different terms. Sometimes, costly ad-hoc technical
designs are used so as to include OTB in the project while distributing
it under those required terms. We could argue that this is a matter of
convincing everyone that copyleft is not harmful and that OTB is worth
the price, but in the mean time OTB get less audience than deserved …
From a practical point of view it could do no harm to simply change the
license to a more permissive one. This might help to develop OTB usage
and eventually get more people involved in contributions.
Setting up a proper Contributor License Agreement
<http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla>
Why ? Because we see and welcome more and more contributions from our
users. Without any other agreement, those contributions are implicitly
made with the same license (i.e. CeCILL v2) while copyright is retained
by the contributor. With an increasing number of contributions, the
project might become a ship impossible to stir, for instance in the
event of a necessary change of license to an up-to-date one (yes
licenses have bugs too !), we would require to ask the permission of
every contributor (for now still possible … but it might turn impossible
if one of them simply vanishes). What does the CLA state ? There are
actually two options : asking for a copyright transfer, in which case
the project owner will own all copyright and thus will be able to take
future actions for it, or asking for the appropriate authorizations to
take those actions while retaining copyright for the contributor. We
prefer the second option, because there is no reason why anyone
contributing should give away her copyright. What we would like to ask
is for the right to relicense the whole software (including
contributions) into an equivalent or more permissive license (this will
guarantee that the code remains OSS), if the PSC of the projects decides
to. A CLA of course requires paperwork and signature (and in case of
corporate contributions, the company should sign it too), but again it
is worth the price, as it will also convince potential users that the
software is free of copyright infringements. Here are the individual
<http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt> and company
<http://www.apache.org/licenses/cla-corporate.txt> CLA of ASF for
instance. We would like to apply it to any significant contribution
(i.e. not for typos or very small patches).
Setting up a Project Steering Committee
Until now, the project has been informally stirred by people at CNES
(Manuel, me, and Jordi or Emmanuel before us). Of course, we are always
discussing technical details and orientations with the dev team at CS as
well as with the otb-developers list, but with the increasing interest
and contributors, we think it is time to set-up an official steering
committee, with publicly identified people, rules and decisions. We
would like this steering committee to be open to any participant, and
new members would be accepted by existing ones following those public rules.
Many thanks for your feedback,
Regards,
Julien
--
Julien MICHEL
CNES - DCT/SI/AP
--
--
Check the OTB FAQ at
http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/FAQ.html
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