[OSGeo-Board] Bylaws posted

[Daniel Brookshier]

As far as licenses, you might consider:

Open Source Initiative (OSI  http://www.opensource.org/ ) licenses  
are approved for applications and Creative Commons(CC http:// 
creativecommons.org/ ) for other data, documentation, images, media,  
and others not covered by a project's chosen OSI license. Any other  
non OSI or CC license use by  a project requires a consensus approval  
by the board on a project owner's request. The board may add licenses  
to the approved licenses available to all projects with a consensus  
vote.

This would allow you to set expectations in general and allow for a  
simple approval by the board for other cases. This also allows the  
board to add a license to the set if there is a specific license you  
find is prevalent for a type of data or existing software.

Daniel Brookshier
Community Manager
https://www.projects.dev2dev.bea.com/
turbogeek at cluck.com
dbrookshier at collab.net

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On Feb 26, 2006, at 9:27 AM, Markus Neteler wrote:

> On 2/23/06, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
> Arnulf Christl (CCGIS) wrote:
> > Spatial data is somewhat special in this respect. I talked to  
> Jimmy Wales
> > Richard Stallman they think GNU FDL is good. Ward Cunningham is  
> into CC,
> > and says its cool for spatial data too obviously.
> >
> > I am not sure though. Daniel Faivre (camptocamp) is very actively
> > promoting a license specially designed to fit spatial data backed  
> by an
> > active Canadian group, they call it PGL. I believe Jo has  
> something up the
> > sleeve too and OSM is also thinking in this line. All of them are  
> highly
> > interested in the OSGeo (well, dunno about OSM, they are sort of  
> sleepy)
> > and it might happen that the Foundation itself will be the body  
> creating
> > this special license. In the end this is one of the things that  
> we came
> > together to do here. What I want to say is that we do not have to  
> choose
> > from different licenses but maybe set out to create one.
>
> Arnulf / Markus,
>
> At one point I proposed that the requirement our software projects use
> OSI approved licenses be written into the bylaws with the intent  
> that it
> would not be easy for a board to contemplate changing any  
> "copyright assigned"
> software to a non-OSI license.  That is, as a sort of limitation on  
> the board
> and the foundation.
>
>
> Frank,
>
> I was refering to data etc, not to software. I am fine with our  
> statement according
> to software (OSI approved licenses).
>
> Since we haven't worked out details of what license(s) are  
> necessary best
> for various kinds of "content" or spatial data, I would suggest we  
> not try to
> address this in the bylaws at this time.  As has been done, it is  
> useful to
> make clear in the bylaws that the OSI approval requirement is for  
> software.
>
> (sure; but I was talking data :-)
>
> Certainly, I would like to see discussion about appropriate  
> licenses for
> web/educational/promotional materials and spatial data.  But there  
> is not
> yet much clarity on the topic.
>
> Agreed. There no widely accepted spatial data license yet. I just  
> wanted to
> avoid that things are mixed with software licenses which won't work.
> For written texts and promotional material the CC licenses seem to  
> work
> well, so there is less of a problem.
>
> My issue was only to not limit the bylaws to only talk about  
> software which
> seems to be the case. No need to hard-code and license there, just  
> be open
> to not *exclude* any future license which may be applicable.
>
> Markus

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