Chris,
Have you read the ASF licensing and copyright policy documents? They address this, and in general this sort of thing in pretty good detail.
Don't worry, you're not the first to notice this.As for copyright statements in other projects: there are certain cases where the files are not 100% licensed through the ASF, but are rather a combination of third party code and code developer for/ through the ASF. Also not that while it is the responsibility of committers to monitor this sort of thing in patches and their own work, we do sometimes make mistakes. In general for the OFBiz code it has been thoroughly reviewed and such things well vetted through the incubation process.
-David On Jan 14, 2007, at 8:45 PM, Chris Howe wrote:
While searching for more answers on how to make the
ofbiz-sandbox ASF friendly (both legally and ASF
administrative safe guard wise), I came across a
distinction between contributions to the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) and contributions to the ASF that I
think may have been inadequately addressed in OFBiz.
IANAL.
Contributions to FSF require a copyright assignment,
while contributions to ASF generally, simply grant
license of use, modification, etc. This distinction
allows FSF software to carry the copyright notice
"Copyright YYYY The Free Software Foundation" by
itself.
I looked at a couple of the other ASF TLPs and noticed
they were either missing a copyright notice in
individual files or in the case of Geronimo, had the
following:
* Copyright 2004, 2005 The Apache Software Foundation
or its licensors, as applicable.
I only looked at a couple files, so this is no where
near a comprehensive search. As it is now, nearly
every file in OFBiz says:
Copyright 2001-2006 The Apache Software Foundation
Which perhaps in and of itself is a copyright
violation. One for the beginning year (it may be
materially false as I wouldn't think a copyright can
be assigned retroactively) and two for the exclusion
of those who may actually have the copyright (the
author, etc). To my knowledge, there was no request
to the community for copyright assignment.
I hope no one construes this as causing a fuss or as a
distraction. One of the reasons for the move to the
ASF for the project, as I understood it, was a
proactive step to avoid legal hassles. I just want us
to take advantage of that benefit and protect all of
our hard work.
TIA for your feedback,
Chris
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