Hi: I'm currently reading "Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code" by Van Lindberg (excellent book, IMHO, written by a former programmer, turned lawyer). There is one point he drives home which I never thought about much, and that is the following.
The basic idea is that any contribution to trac which contains over 15 lines of code (15 is the common denominator - some non-GPL'd projects allow for slightly larger patches, though no one has a legally well-defined idea of how big the patch must be to be copyrightable - it involves the "words and phrases doctrine") or comments which eventually makes it into the codebase of Sage should be properly licensed. That is, the person should more-or-less say (a) they are the creator of the work, (b) own the copyright (eg, it is not a owned by their employer as terms of some hiring agreement), and (c) either place it in the public domain or agree to license it with a GPL2+-compatible license. Van Lindberg points out implicit licenses are not legally binding and presents a legal horror story of one guy "contributing" code he do not own to an OS sourceforge project, only to be bankrupted by lawsuits and SF being required to remove his code. There is currently nothing in terms of licensing or copyrights on the trac main page or in the wiki TracGuidelines. But even having this written warning may not be enough - the author really needs to say yes or no in response to an I agree button or a signed agreement or something. IWIlliam sent an email around not too long asking for agreement to license their contributions under the GPL2+, but developers are constantly growing and having William send an email every 6 months or so doesn't seem to me to be a very scaleable or organized solution. I think I have a simple workable solution, which I want to get your feedback on. One possibility is for everyone who requests a trac account from Michael, they get an "Yes I agree/No I don't agree" email which they must reply to before Michael actually merges a contribution into the Sage distribution. My suggestion is that once "Joe the Developer" asks Michael for an account on trac, Michael gives him an account and in the same email has a blurb about going immediately to the CLA page on trac and entering his name and data along with "I Agree" or "I Do Not Agree". I posted a draft of this form on http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wdj/sagefiles/sage-individual-cla.html The idea is that this would be on a page on trac, which you would have to sign into. (Hopefully trac keeps trac of such edits in a database?) Thoughts or comments? - David Joyner --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
