[OSGeo-Discuss] copyright question

[Howard Butler]

On Dec 9, 2008, at 1:11 PM, Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> today I was in a meeting about GeoExt, and the following question  
> came up:
>
> "Is it possible for OsGeo to take copyright for a project which yet  
> has to form and has not passed incubation as such?"

It's certainly much easier than getting all past contributors to sign  
off.  As to whether or not we allow that, I don't think we have any  
precedent.  I don't know who you'd ask other than maybe the incubation  
committee to come up with a policy that they could recommend to the  
board to sign off on.  I think the incubation committee is the place  
to have the argument whether OSGeo can support setting up a shell to  
hold a potential project including copyright assignment.  From a  
systems standpoint, we do support shell or nascent projects, but not  
from a legal one AFAIK.

>
>
> A commercial company has expressed issues contributing if the  
> copyright is not owned by a trustworthy independent organization  
> such as OsGeo.
>

In my opinion, copyright really only matters if you are going to  
*change the license* after the fact.  Getting contribution under a  
license that people can agree to is more important than who maintains  
the copyright and has the ability to change the license if they want  
at some point in the future after the project has been going.  In  
fact, the more contributors there are, the harder it becomes to go  
back and change things.  IMO, this voids the worry about trust.  Trust  
the license under which you agree to participate in the project, not  
the individual who maintains the copyright on the one source file in  
the project that adds XYZ feature.

Howard