Re: Copyright Statement

[David E. Jones]

Chris,





-David


On Jan 14, 2007, at 9:22 PM, Chris Howe wrote:

Do you mean the NOTICE and LICENSE files in OFBiz? You'll only find information on libraries included and their corresponding licenses in those files. I recommend looking on the apache.org site for general information about the ASF and its policies.

David,
Can you point me to where the copyright policy
addresses the contributors as being the copyright
holders for the OFBiz code instead of ASF?  <inquiring
tone, not skepticism>  I'm not seeing them in NOTICE
or LICENSE, but they are rather long :-)

TIA,
Chris

--- "David E. Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

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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