Myself and a few other people are in the planning stages for a new Open Source project, tentatively called "Ogham". This will be crossplatform and most team members are Windows guys. I am the only member with any Open Source development experience. We are tentatively leaning towards Qt as a toolkit and BSD as a license.
Or immediate problem, among others, is how to copyright the software. There are three basic ways to go as we see it: 1) Each author retains copyright for their non-trivial contribution. Since we will probably use the BSD license, this does not create a huge problem. But would the package as-a-whole need a distinct copyright holder? Would a generic "Ogham Development Team" suffice, or is something much more formal needed? 2) Once person is copyright holder, and everyone else needs to assign contributions to him or her. This is what GNU does. One problem with this is deciding who gets to be the copyright holder. Another problem is the administrative hassle of assigning the copyrights over. We want to make contributing as painless as possible. 3) Create an umbrella group to hold the copyright. Does this need to be a formal foundation or non-profit? Do contributions still need their copyrights assigned over, or could the group act as the "compiler" of the compilation? I've done a quick survey of some OSS projects, and their all either seem to the second since they were initially started by a single individual, or the third since they grew considerably in size. Thanks in advance, -- David Johnson ___________________ http://www.usermode.org pgp public key on website -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3