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)? > The "one way declaration" (which makes sense since one person needs to sign it). > * Is the bylaws a garantee good enough that the project will stay > OpenSource? > I confess I was supposed to look into this for us; I will not have time today.
But by their nature bylaws can be changed, so no guarantee. Usually you trust an organization to keep bylaws in the same direction as their charter. And the OSGeo charter has the open source mandate. > 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?) > I would hope so. But even with a "non-profit" mandate organizations are sometimes asked to break even. There have a been a few spirited debates on OSGeo offering certification as and would that set up a conflict with members etc... Right now I take the benifit of OSGeo offering legal protection over a fear they may compete with me in the future. However our voice in OSGeo direction is proportional to our involvement (we have Chris Holmes, David Blasby, Justin and myself as members). I have mostly focused on the incubation and marketing side of the OSGeo equation. Cheers, Jody ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier. Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
