[Board] [Incubator] The geotools license agenda item

[Jody Garnett]

Thanks for wrapping things up Arnulf.

I will collect anything you think interesting on that dual license
proposal. We tend to keep even failed or withdrawn proposals around in
order to learn for next time.

--
Jody Garnett

On 10/08/2012, at 6:51 PM, "Seven (aka Arnulf)" <seven at arnulf.us> wrote:

> On 08/10/2012 04:29 AM, Martin Desruisseaux wrote:
>> Le 10/08/12 08:27, Jody Garnett a écrit :
>>> The foundation would justly be annoyed if a PSC relicensed an existing
>>> project under a closed source license. The same setup can occur if a
>>> contributor is free to set the license of a derived work. Indeed we
>>> would be placed in a very strange spot where the header would need to
>>> show OSGeo copyright, but the rest of the header could outline a
>>> license not in keeping with our goals.
>
> Good point, this should not happen and the current license agreement
> does not allow it (in my understanding). We can go on and on becoming
> more intricate but probably we have reached a deppth that we should be
> comfortable with now. But anyway, let me add another layer of
> reassurance that everything is going to be good:
>
> The code header reading the OSGeo copyright cannot stay in place
> whenever any portion of the code is (rightfully) relicensed by the
> corresponding contributor under a closde license because of this section
> of the GeoTools CLA [1]:
>
> In the event the Foundation makes the Submission available to third
> parties, it shall do so only in accordance with the requirements of the
> by­laws of the Foundation, currently hosted at
> http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/incorporation/bylaws.html. In
> particular, the portions of the Submission integrated to the core
> library will be licensed to the third party under a license approved as
> an open
> source license by the Open Source Initiative, or any substantially
> similar license that meets the Open Source Definition or Free Software
> Definition. The specific license used will be chosen in suitable
> consultation with the group governing the Project.
>
> Comment:
> The OSGeo foundation has bound itself legally to Open Source Licenses
> maintained by the OSI. Thus without changing out very bylaws the code
> under copyright of OSGeo is also bound to the OSI definition.
>
> In case someone wants to relicense their own code under a non-OSI licene
> they will have to remove the OSGeo copyright section. This does not
> prevent someone from changing from a copyleft effect license like the
> GPL to a permissive BSD/MIT style version under OSGeo copyright header
> but that is within the remit of the foundation. If the foundation would
> want to be more specific we would have to adopt one specific license
> which is to be used by all projects but this is something we we
> collectively decided is not what we want. Others like Apache or Eclipse
> went down this road but they also have another focus and another set of
> issues.
>
>> Just for the record, my understanding is that what a contributor do with
>> its own contribution has no impact on the project. I mean, a contributor
>> can re-license a separated copy of his contribution, but no re-licensing
>> done on contributor's side can have any impact on the project license,
>> especially not on derivative work done by other peoples. The "derivative
>> work" that a contributor can distribute according the Copyright
>> Assignment is only the contributor's own derivative work.
>>
>>    Martin
>
> I concur with Martin here, thanks for the clarification.
>
> Now: All of what was discussed in this and related threads is pretty
> good stuff. But we will forget. And I can see us dig through amil
> archives in a few years to avoid having to go through the pain of
> learning again. Anbody have a suggestion where we can add paragraphs
> like Martin's above so that we find and understand them in a few years?
> My unimaginative self would probably post them in the Wiki but maybe
> there is better ways to do this now?
>
> Cheers,
> Arnulf
>
> [1]
> http://docs.geotools.org/latest/developer/_downloads/GeotoolsAssignmentToOSGeo.pdf
>
> --
> Seven of Nine
> http://arnulf.us/Seven
> Exploring Body, Space and Mind
> _______________________________________________
> Incubator mailing list
> Incubator at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator