Niclas Hedhman wrote:
On Tuesday 03 May 2005 23:07, Ralph Goers wrote:
Well, that may be true, but not being a lawyer I really don't know. As
I read it I understood Larry basically saying, "We provide the legal
guidance, but we can't make you do anything". However, I guess I'd
like somebody to clarify this to the point that we really understand
what we should be doing.
For those who doesn't follow legal-discuss@ mailing list, this issue is even more complex than @author tags and Copyright notices at the top of each file.
The discussion has been revolving around the necessity for employees (esp in the USA) to get the Corporate CLA signed by his/her employer even if no OSS development was happening at work. The bottom line was basically, "No matter when an employee produces IP, the employer can claim it.", but I got the strong impression that this is not the case in Europe, where the employer can not claim IP (even with IP transfer contracts) if it has been produced without any assistance of the employer (i.e. bandwidth, computers, office space, et cetera)
I am sure more rigid recommendations around ICLA, CCLA and Copyright notices will emerge from the legal group in due time.
Meanwhile, since many other Apache projects have removed @author tags, and have Copyright notice set to ASF, the Cocoon project will not inflict any additional damage if this is not correct procedure, until told otherwise.
The copyright attribution to the ASF seems to be problematic as it seems that, at least in some countries, an author cannot give its copyright.
At Jackrabbit for example, they have no author tags and their source files start with "Copyright 2004-2005 The Apache Software Foundation or its licensors, as applicable". This should cover both the collective work on which the ASF has copyright and the copyright of individual contributors that have licenced their work to the ASF.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://apache.org/~sylvain http://anyware-tech.com Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
