[Board] Re: GeoTools implementation path approval

[Frank Warmerdam]

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> Adrian passionately raises some unpleasant, although very important topics.
> 
> We are starting to get an appreciation for the cost of incubation and 
> the various legal support OSGeo offers. While we would all love OSGeo to 
> provide a legal umbrella for OSGeo projects, I'm not sure we have 
> previously costed this support, and then allocated appropriate funds or 
> resources for this support.

Cameron,

Are you speaking of the legal cost of due diligence on projects
completing incubation (including work on legal agreements) or the
cost to fight a lawsuit if one were brought against a project?

The hard financial costs through the incubation process for most
projects is zero, though there is obviously a substantial though
variable investment "in kind" by project members, mentors and other
incubator participants.  I'm not sure how to budget for this, but the
limition of one project per mentor, and only taking on projects for
which a mentor steps forward is intended to keep our manpower
commitments somewhat managable.  The incubator has also put the
"at most 10 projects at a time in incubation" cap for this purpose.

> Alternatively we could investigate aligning with projects like the FSF.

I'm not sure how this would help.  Is the supposition that submitting
a project like Geotools to become an part of the GNU Project under the
direct administration of the FSF would give substantial legal protection?

> We should include project graduation support into the OSGeo budget, and 
> feed the information back into the application process.
 >
> Adrian asks how we would handle law suites? I'd like to extend this 
> question further. Does OSGeo have a risk management plan? Have we 
> identified what issues could go wrong, and how we can mitigate against 
> them? Risk Management is standard project management practice and 
> probably should be included in the Incubation Process.

We do not have a comprehensive written risk management plan.  However, the
provenance review, and related "good practices" we look for in Incubation
are the foundations due diligence so that if there is a lawsuit we can
demonstrate having made a reasonable effort to not infringe on any one
else's copyrighted code or licenses.  Our legal advice in the past  has
been that these are important steps to reduce liability, as well as to
avoid getting into lawsuits in the first place.

Most of the other risks that have been discussed by the board, or in
relation to incubation have been reputational risks to OSGeo from poorly
conducted projects.  This sort of risk does not have a direct financial
aspect but does impact the ability of the foundation to accomplish it's
mission.



-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org