Hey all,
Unfortunately the situation is an itsy tiny bit more complicated than
what Jody sets out. Jody lays out the essentials but the problem, as I
see it, is
The letter that OSGeo has prepared doesn't work for us.
Off the top of my head (which means that I'm forgetting stuff) the
agreement doesn't distinguish code from docs, didn't (although this may
have changed) distinguish your contributions for geotools (lgpl) from
your contributions to other projects (with possibly other licenses), and
talks about 'intellectual property' as if that were something that made
legal sense (when it's actually lots of different kinds of law for
different kinds of issues that have no legal relation to each other).
So we need to write a letter. Actually, OSGeo needs to write the letter
but since they don't seem to grok the fact there is an issue, it has
fallen on us to try to cobble something together that they would approve
and we would sign. OSGeo is *different* from Apache (single license for
all projects) and from OO.org (single project). Unfortunately, this is
legal territory so it ought to be done well, with professional help, and
with broad participation.
It would be easy to do this sloppily and the current letter would work
for that. I'm personally not going to sign a sloppy letter because I
suspect that will lead to more headaches than not having a letter at
all. Linux, to my knowledge, still doesn't have a letter and yet has
some serious clout. So not having a letter is not the worst thing.
However, I would presume OSGeo would want to work out the issues, which
are general to all projects not just Geotools, and produce the best
letter it possibly can. So far they don't seem to care all that much.
The plan, going forward, was to write a letter and present that to the
Geotools contributors with those of us who buy into it saying we were
going to sign it and encouraging everyone else to join us.
Although I got very close to a letter that would cover the issues and be
acceptable during my last push, I didn't finish. Now I am having to do
other things for a bit. If no one picks up the effort in the next month
or so, I'll end up doing it when I settle back down again. I would
proceed by:
1) Getting Frank to buy into the process since it appears he
doesn't see any issues with the current letter.
2) Tweaking my last proposal to get it right. This ideally would
happen as a collaboration with Frank and a good free software
licensing lawyer.
That's how I see things and where I stand. We are close, it will take a
week or two of legal work to get a letter and a month to advocate and
get as many people as possible to download, print, sign and send in the
letter. I'd guess it would all happen in early Spring sometime.
cheers,
adrian
On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 01:44 -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Martin Desruisseaux wrote:
> > Le lundi 05 février 2007 à 19:37 -0800, Jody Garnett a écrit :
> >> The question is do we need these assurances in the legal document
> >> (making it a two way agreement)? Contributor agreements are normally a
> >> "one way declaration by the assignor that they are assigning their
> >> copyright to another party". We may simply be content with the or the
> >> OSGeo charter and bylaws?
> >
> > I would like to know:
> >
> > * What is the common practice with other open source fundation?
> > (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla)?
>
> Martin,
>
> Open Office requires all non-trivial contributors to sign a unilateral
> copyright assignment to Sun.
>
> http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/jca.pdf
>
> Mozilla requires the signing of the form at:
>
> http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/CVS-Contributor-Form.pdf
>
> This is a kind of contributor agreement, but it primariliy just
> verifies that the code being contributed is under the NPL and that
> the contributor has rights to contribute it. It is quite similar to
> the GDAL committer guidelines. It does not really do anything other
> than make it difficult for the signer to claim their code was not
> contributed under the NPL at a later date.
>
> BTW, contrary to what Jody said, Apache doesn't do copyright assignment.
> They do a contributor licensing agreement similar to the "Contributor
> Agreement" document that Rich originally wrote up and that is in use
> by MapGuide and FDO.
>
> > * Is the bylaws a garantee good enough that the project will stay
> > OpenSource?
>
> As things stand, the bylaws can be changed at will by the board, so
> this is not really any guarantee. We are looking at revising the
> bylaws in the coming months to tighten things up. This would likely
> include requirements such as any change to the bylaws requiring a
> majority vote of the charter membership or something similar. At
> that point I think you could trust the bylaws to the extent that you
> trust the current and future charter members.
>
> > I tend to trust OSGeo and would probably be okay with a one way
> > declaration. I'm aware of the "MathWorld" sad story, but it was a deal
> > with a for-profit publisher. This is not the case of OSGeo (it will stay
> > a not-for-profit organization, isn't it?)
>
> There is some danger is assigning all the code to one party, like OSGeo,
> in that a by accident (as in the MathWorld case) or design the license
> and copyright of the whole project could be put in jeapardy at once. But
> nothing that OSGeo does in the future can undo the currently distributed
> code's license in the sense of taking it away from the community. At worst
> the foundation could weaken the requirements of the current license (allowing
> non-reciprocal explotation of the code for instance). I think in the
> MathWorld
> case a big part of the problem is that the materials were never properly
> released under an open license with proper guarantees of freedom.
>
> Best regards,
> --
> ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
> I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
> and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org
>
>
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