[Board] incubation and risk

[Jachym Cepicky]

Hi Jody,

thanks for the info.

I do not know why, I somehow had feeling, that the code is checked as
well for potential patents issues?

Jachym

2014-10-01 1:08 GMT+02:00 Jody Garnett <jody.garnett at gmail.com>:
> One nice thing coming out of foss4g presentation and discussion has been
> additional questions about incubation, offers to help on the incubation list
> and a few good questions.
>
> I have gotten a couple questions about incubation and risk from potential
> mentors worried about liability. In response to one of these off-list
> questions I have been asked to bounce the current state of play off the
> board list.
>
> My understanding is that OSGeo does not provide a formal code audit. We ask
> that the software be made available under an open source license, and we ask
> projects themselves to perform a minimal sanity check on their codebase
> (basically checking the headers and listing known problems - preferably in
> an issue tracker).
>
> Our OSGeo badged software is thus use-at-your-own-risk (indeed the open
> source licenses all make that pretty clear).
>
> The advantage of incubation:
> - the board has some assurance a project is open source before we consider
> any promotion
> - with list of known problems provide potential users have a head start for
> their own audit/risk assessment
>
> So the question from off-list is this:
>
> - Checking that board members understand the current state of play
> - Sanity check that OSGeo, and importantly project mentors, are not being
> exposed to liability
>
> My own experience of incubation was mentors acting as a guide to what
> resources are available. Be that an example of how other projects managed,
> or putting us in contact with free software foundation or similar as
> required.
> --
> Jody Garnett
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board



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Jachym Cepicky
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