[OSGeo-Board] Legal help from OSGeo?

[Jo Walsh]

dear Porter, it is good to get an introduction to you. There are a
couple of areas in which progress in stalling for OSGeo because of
'IANAL syndrome' - we can have endless pseudolegal conversations but
would benefit from a reliable legal word. If you had time to help, or
could recommend someone who does, that would be amazing.

Without wanting to presume anything about your time or energy i'd like
to quickly highlight the issues that OSGeo seems to be facing at the moment:

- The Geotools project is undergoing a lot of uncertainty about code
  copyright and what is the best thing for them and the foundation.
  Their Project Management Committee is established awhile but has no
  legal status and copyright in the code belongs to each individual.
  They are working on a set of draft agreements which need a legal eyeover.
  There are some notes talking about their perspective at:
  http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/GeoTools_Incubation_Progress#Copyright_to_OSGeo_Y.2FN

- OSGeo should be making an application for 501(c)3 status and though
  it may be possible for the Exec Director to do a lot of the
  preparatory work, again this needs a legal sanitycheck.

The Geotools code-legal situation looks quite pressing; the project
can't get out of incubation without resolution and the heel-dragging
looks to be causing a bit of angst in that development community which
it would be great to be able to defuse. This would establish a super
valuable precedent for other complex and mature incubating projects,
and open up the incubation process to a lot of the rest of the Java
stack that redistributes Geotools.

As a board member I want OSGeo-as-entity be able to help projects if 
things are going wrong especially if OSGeo is the root cause!
I think it makes sense for the Geotools community to present OSGeo
with the situation they would like to be in legally, but this is a lot
of overhead for a people who as we often hear are more interested in
hacking code than in hacking rules. Is it possible to meet in the middle?

cheers,


jo
On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 05:22:04PM -0800, Gary Lang wrote:
> We do have a replacement. Board, meet Porter Merriman. Porter, meet the
> OSGeo board.
> 
> Porter, can you spare some cycles here? 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Gary 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Holmes [mailto:cholmes at openplans.org]
> Sent: Monday, October 30, 2006 2:59 PM
> To: OSGeo-Board
> Subject: [OSGeo-Board] Legal help from OSGeo?
> 
> Hey, what's the status with legal help from OSGeo?
> 
> My GeoTools guys have a number of questions that they want a lawyer to
> sound in on.  Rich is great, but he's volunteer only these days.
> 
> One of the 'benefits' we've talked about for projects is legal advice
> and protection.  Can we put funding towards getting a lawyer's time?  Or
> is there an autodesk person who's taking over Rich's role?  Could we get
> some in-kind time from autodesk's in house lawyers?  Or are there some
> other options?  This seems to be a gating issue for GeoTools to move out
> of incubation...  I think it's just clarification on what we've got
> written already, but it'd be nice to have an official voice weigh in.
> 
> Chris
> 
> --
> Chris Holmes
> The Open Planning Project
> http://topp.openplans.org
> 
> 
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