On 14/05/12 14:34, Andrea Aime wrote:
> It is my understanding that if you're the sole author of a particular
> piece of code
> you retain the right to re-license it without having to get approval from
> The Open Planning Project (that is, you give TOPP the copyright without losing
> yours, might be wrong here).
Yes.
GeoServer contributors assign their copyrights to TOPP:
"For good and valuable consideration, receipt of which I acknowledge, I,
___________________,
hereby transfer to The Open Planning Project ("TOPP") my entire right,
title, and interest (including all
rights under copyright) in the program GeoServer (“Program”), including
original code, accompanying
documentation and supporting files, changes and enhancements to the
Program code and accompanying
files, and all future modifications of the Program code and accompanying
files, subject to the conditions
below."
Then TOPP licences it back to you for any purpose:
"TOPP hereby grants me a royalty-free non-exclusive license to use or
sub-license the Work
assigned hereunder (i.e., if I am assigning changes and enhancements to
the Program to TOPP, the license
granted by TOPP to me is only for those changes and enhancements to the
Program I assigned, it is not for
the Program which I changed or enhanced itself) for any purpose. TOPP's
rights shall otherwise continue
unchanged."
And so you should be able to sublicence it to OSGeo. I think this is
what the second quote means. I'm not sure if you can assign your
copyright again, as you no longer have it. But I am not a lawyer.
My point is that the original author should be able to copy code from
GeoServer to GeoTools, and TOPP should be able to authorise such
copying, but in general, other developers cannot. To do so would allow
rogue developers to sneak out from the clutches of the GPL (imagine some
committing all of GeoServer into the GeoTools repo so they could claim
it as LGPL).
> Generally speaking we never had an automatic mechanism like you describe
> though, to put it in place I believe we'd need quite a bit of red tape.
I think it is an issue that should be addressed. If we go to the effort
of getting contributor agreements, then this issue should be addressed.
--
Ben Caradoc-Davies <[email protected]>
Software Engineer
CSIRO Earth Science and Resource Engineering
Australian Resources Research Centre
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