Hi, On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Brent Lintner <[email protected]> wrote: > I was wondering: once the project's codebase is officially contributed > (i.e. pushed) to an ASF git repo, what does this mean for Copyright? > > Does the Copyright change from this point onward? Or will it (or should it) > remain as Copyright Research In Motion?
In the legal sense, i.e. who owns the original copyrights to the code, nothing changes - the code that was and hopefully will be written by RIM remains under its copyright. The only thing that's different is the license that RIM and other Ripple contributors grant to the ASF to distribute their code under ALv2 or other similar terms. On the other hand, what does change is this copyright/licensing information is documented in source headers and other metadata like the LICENSE and NOTICE files in the source tree. See http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html as the authoritative source of Apache policy on this. In short, we'll need to change all Ripple source headers to the generic Apache header instead of listing any specific copyrights. The rationale behind this is that over time we hope many different people and companies to contribute to these files, and managing detailed copyright records of all those contributions is a waste of time as the information is already recorded in the version control and issue tracking systems. The Cordova NOTICE files don't explicitly mention the copyrights of various contributors as keeping that information around adds extra complexity to downstream distributors (the ALv2 requires them to pass on the details in NOTICE). In some other projects though the original contributor of a codebase has an entry in the NOTICE file. If RIM wants something like that, an extra line like "Based on source code originally developed by Research In Motion (http://www.rim.com/)" could be added to the Ripple NOTICE along with the standard Apache bits. > ..but I am still not 100% sure, regarding our situation, and would > appreciate any insight into this, and if this is something we will need to > do after contributing the code. :-) Updating the source headers and other licensing metadata can be done either before or after the codebase gets migrated to Apache. The only real deadline is that getting these licensing bits in order is a precondition to cutting the first release of Apache Ripple. BR, Jukka Zitting
