On 22/02/13 09:08, Sebastian Schaffert wrote:
Hi Andy,
we had some patches from Peter Ansell in the parsing components for JSON-LD
and RDF/JSON.
You can use them anyway (with the right copyright handling) but I'm sure
Peter will be willing to grant them to Apache, then you can treat them
like everything else which is easier in the long run (no extra NOTICE or
LICENSE entries). If it's recent, it may even be covered by his current
Apache iCLA which would be perfect.
As often with legal stuff, a small amount of work now can save a lot of
work later.
(With Jena we had about 10 significant items to chase up - the previous
environment at HP made it hard to take large contributions as one large
org does not like "giving" things to another - everyone was very helpful
and we were only left with one item where the company no longer existed
and we stuck with the BSD license terms it arrived under)
Some of the code originates from old projects (e.g. the
parser for the reasoning language) and has been written by persons
currently not associated with the project. I'll check with them on the
license (but all code was either BSD or APL).
Usually the terms and conditions of someone's employment says the
employer owns the copyright. If so, and if it was Salzburg Research,
then it may well already be covered by the existing grant. For once, no
extra legal work to do!
Otherwise I think there have not been any major third-party contributions.
Andy
