[OSGeo-Discuss] Board Proposal: Statement of OSGeo Legal Support

[Jody Garnett]

Arnulf Christl wrote:
> Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> Good processes + no money is an acceptable strategy so long as we 
>> have consciously made this decision and everyone is aware of the 
>> strategy.
>
> Hello,
> keeping budgets low already is a corporate strategy of OSGeo as far as 
> I am concerned. I am eager to extend this strategy to Legal Support. 
> We are not here to fight legal wars but to further Free and Open 
> Source Software.
Odd; not what I signed up for. For me an open source foundation is there 
to protect and promote. Without both I am stuck shopping around to other 
foundations for help; a bit of a waste of my time.
> Whenever someone does want to pick on us we should have a solid ground 
> and we have this with the incubation guidelines as they are. All that 
> has to  happen then will then happen, not now.
I do not believe that; the job of the first projects through the 
incubation process is to set the guidelines - as such they are still 
very much a work in progress.
> As long as we have more or less empty pockets and do not aim at 
> leveraging money as a major facilitator against anybody and we 
> continue to build our brand as being a straight group of spatial FOSS 
> addicts there is little reason to get at us from the legal side 
> anyway. What would you get? A bad reputation, little or no money at 
> all and a large bunch of really angry people. Hooray, lets go sue some 
> Foundations.
Depends what you are after; as Paul's recent blog shows patents and so 
forth are a very strange chess game and these older open source projects 
are a large body of prior art. We have already had to remove code 
violating patents from GeoTools; and I trust we will need to do so again.
> My personal opinion is that a lot of the discussion is beside the 
> point and we are oftentimes confusing copyright, ownership, 
> originator's rights, branding and what really makes up a project - the 
> community around it. We should get a lawyer only when we need one as 
> we cannot anticipate in which context we will need her. Please never 
> ever be IANAL again, I am tired of reading that phrase.
Fair enough; on a pragmatic front the only reason I care about this 
stuff at all is because I hate getting email to the effect of "We did a 
review 6 months ago and felt your project was too risky". I am trying to 
be proactive about contributors fears; so that all this legal stuff 
stops separating the community.
> Call me simplistic but I am still of the strong opinion that all we 
> need to do is get some GeoTools developers go through the project 
> files, change the Copyright to point at OSGeo and commit. My only 
> concern was that the developers might feel they lose control and OSGeo 
> could go berserk and sell the code Copyright to some big bad corporation. 
Actually we are ready to do just that; we have a "change proposal page" 
to that effect sitting there ready to go. The GeoTools PMC approved this 
direction over a year ago.

What we don't want to do is inflict a codebase on the OSGeo board 
without them feeling comfortable about what they are signing up for.
> I think it simply cannot. And even if it did it wouldn't make any 
> difference as anybody can always fork the last GNUed one and go for 
> it. Can we get over it, please and let GeoTools graduate?
This discussion; and definition of scope; is exactly what the GeoTools 
incubation process is supposed to be contributing to the foundation. Yes 
we could graduate at any time (simply by changing our policy so that 
contributors retain copyright - like half the OSGeo projects); that 
would be a disservice to the next project through the gates.

Cheers,
Jody