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<TITLE>PSC: Legal Issues</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Well it was brought to my attention that there are some legal issues of concerne between OSGEO and GRASS. Lets see if we can hash some of these out</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Scott Mitchell comented </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">-----------------------------------</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Times New Roman">I too had concerns about the copyright transfer issues early on, but this seems to have been taken care of.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Offline coment (no permission for name was obtained so I'll keep it anonymous)</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">------------------------------------------</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Potential legal issues top my list of concerns.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Source: </FONT><A HREF="http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_Project_Steering_Commitee"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_Project_Steering_Commitee</FONT></U></A>
<BR><FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Courier New">One benefit of the foundation is some degree of legal<BR>
support and protection for the project. The flip side of that<BR>
is that the foundation needs to ensure some degree of<BR>
rigor and process in how code comes into the project. One<BR>
part of that is getting committers to sign a legal agreement<BR>
indicating that they agree that changes they commit will<BR>
be under the license of GRASS (GPL) and that they have<BR>
the right to submit the code (they wrote it, it is not<BR>
patented, have permission from their employer, etc).</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">...</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Courier New">o We will have to review the existing code base (which is<BR>
huge - more than 500000 lines of source code in GRASS 6).<BR>
Luckily a major code review was already done for GRASS 5.<BR>
Also the "Debianization" process was performed for GRASS<BR>
5 and GRASS 6.</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">So what other legal issues need clearing up here? What are these other issues?</FONT>
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