Hey- The Project Steering Committee has been discussing some issues with our Contributor License Agreement and code copyright. While there are associated issues that might follow from this, we are at the point where we'll be voting on proposals to change the copyright statement in the code source and the authors file we maintain.
The bottom line is that by signing our CLA, contributors do not assign copyright to anyone. Instead, our CLA is about granting a license to the project maintainer (MetaCarta). It follows from this that the copyright to OpenLayers is collectively held by the individuals and corporations that signed contributor agreements. Thanks to Chris for his careful work deciphering things. Below are summaries of his two proposals that we will be voting on (full message at the bottom). 1. Copyright in Source ---------------------- Change all source files and other copyright statements to read "Copyright OpenLayers Contributors" instead of "Copyright MetaCarta, Inc." In addition, include the URL for the authors file in the copyright statement. 2. Corporations in Authors File ------------------------------- Where we have signed CCLA documents from contributors, include the Corporation name along with the individual's name in the authors.txt file. e.g. James Bond (Her Majesty's Secret Service) Thanks for voting. And again, thanks to Chris for careful deductive work. I'm +1 on both proposals. Tim -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [OpenLayers-PSC] Two proposals: Copyright in Source, Corporate Copyright in Authors Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 10:14:28 -0500 From: Christopher Schmidt <crschm...@metacarta.com> To: p...@openlayers.org Hi, Two proposals. Please vote on each individually. ---- Currently, the OpenLayers source files say "Copyright MetaCarta, Inc." with a date. This is not correct; since we only have a license to code from our contributors, and not the actual copyright of it, we should instead change this text from: /* Copyright (c) 2006-2008 MetaCarta, Inc., published under the Clear BSD * license. See http://svn.openlayers.org/trunk/openlayers/license.txt for the * full text of the license. */ to /* Copyright (c) 2006-2009 OpenLayers Contributors, published under the Clear * BSD license. See http://svn.openlayers.org/trunk/openlayers/license.txt for * the full text of the license. */ I am in favor of this change. (+1) ---- Currently, our doc/authors.txt list does not identify the corporate entities associated with contributors during the time which they made contributions to OpenLayers. (Essentially, tying a CCLA to a person.) Since the code copyright actually belongs in part to these organizations, I recommend that we do our best to fix this situation, by doing our best to associate users in the d oc/authors.txt with their corporate parents where appropriate. For example, this might look like: Christopher Schmidt (MetaCarta) Tim Schaub (OpenGeo) Schuyler Erle (MetaCarta, Entropy Free) I am in favor of this change. (+1) Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ PSC mailing list p...@openlayers.org http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/psc -- Tim Schaub OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org Expert service straight from the developers. _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list Dev@openlayers.org http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
