[Board] The "impartiality" agenda item

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Hello Mickael

Le 09/08/12 06:36, Michael P. Gerlek a écrit :
> There is an item on the agenda for tomorrow's meeting having to do with impartiality.
>
> I looked briefly through the threads referenced and saw only one relevant post -- by Adrian Custer about Martin Desruisseaux not being a charter member and about the makeup of the board being stacked in favor of GeoServer.
>
> With all due respect to Adrian, it's not clear to me that there are any actual substantive issues that need to be addressed. Was there other discussion about this that I missed? What's the real issue here that we're being asked to discuss tomorrow, and with what expected decision or resolution to be achieved?

The issue is related to another point, which is to clarify whatever 
contributors who signed the Copyright Assignment are granted the right 
to re-license their own work, providing that all other contributions are 
removed. The Geotk developers asked for re-licensing their work more 
than once in the last years. Every requests until recently were 
redirected to the GeoTools PMC, which put that PMC in a situation of 
judge and party. The geotools-admin thread contains some risk analysis 
about an Apache-SIS project concurrencing GeoTools. Such analysis is 
admittedly GeoTools PMC role, but this is done at the expense of the 
contributor's rights if GeoTools interests take precedence.

The Copyright Assignment is an agreement between the contributors and 
OSGeo; if some terms need to be clarified, it seems to us that it should 
be done by OSGeo. Delegating the decision to one of the parties having 
vested interest is at risk of causing dispute.

     Martin