I've thoroughly gone through the Daffodil codebase and documented all the potential code ownership issues that I think need to be resolved before we can donate the code to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). My findings are below.
1) The majority of the code is copyright NCSA, Tresys, or Mike Beckerle. The contributors from NCSA and some from Tresys now work at different companies and so contacting all of them may be difficult. We have contacted representatives for these entities and are working to get SGAs from NCSA, Tresys, and Mike Beckerle in place. We believe these three SGAs should cover contributions made by past employees. 2) Some contributions came from other entities that we no longer have contact with. Based on the git log, this includes: - Jeffrey Jacobs (Navy Research Lab) - Stephanie Huber (Air Force Research Lab) - Alonza Mumford (Department of Defense) - Jonathan Cranford (MITRE) - Jacob Baker (Booze Allen Hamilton) Of this list, the first three are federal government entities. Our understanding is that federal government contributions are Public Domain, and so perhaps we do not need an SGA for these contributions? This needs to be confirmed. We have looked at the patches contributed from the non-government entities (Jonathan Cranford and Jacob Baker), and have confirmed that their changes have since been replaced as Daffodil has evolved, so we do not believe an SGA is necessary for their contributions. 3) A handful of tests and schema files were given to us from IBM and include an IBM copyright. The license for these files is unknown. We are working with IBM to get an SGA for these contributions. 4) The tests in item 3 include example snippets taken out of the DFDL specification, which are labeled as copyright Global Gird Forum (now renamed to the Open Grid Forum (OGF)). Regarding the ownership of these files, the OGF has stated: In general OGF takes the position that it does not copyright or license software, and that the examples used in specifications are just that, examples of how to use the specification rather than separately copyrighted code snippets. The full copyright notice regarding the contents of OGF documents is at: https://www.ogf.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/about/copyright The copyright is copied at the end of this email for reference [1]. To me, this means we do not need an SGA, but may need to include the copyright notice from the link. 5) We have copied code from the Scala library into Daffodil. The license is 3-clause BSD and should not cause any issues, aside from needing to include the license. 6) We have copied code from the Passera library into Daffodil. The license is 3-clause BSD and should not cause any issues, aside from needing to include the license. We additionally have dependencies on other libraries, but none of their code is included in the Daffodil source. We believe they are all compatible with the Apache v2 license, including Apache v2, BSD, MIT, and ICU. We are also working on getting a CCLA from Tresys, since all initial committers are employed by Tresys. - Steve [1] Open Grid Forum Full Copyright Notice: * Copyright (C) Open Grid Forum (insert applicable years). Some Rights Reserved. * This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included as references to the derived portions on all such copies and derivative works. The published OGF document from which such works are derived, however, may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the OGF or other organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing new or updated OGF documents in conformance with the procedures defined in the OGF Document Process, or as required to translate it into languages other than English. OGF, with the approval of its board, may remove this restriction for inclusion of OGF document content for the purpose of producing standards in cooperation with other international standards bodies. The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be revoked by the OGF or its successors or assignees.
