[Board] incubation and risk

[Jody Garnett]

We do not offer anything so formal. Remember we are asking the project team
to perform these checks, and they are not in position to offer a legal
review or patent check. We are asking for a very minimal check for mistakes
so obvious a developer can find them :)

The one thing we, as a foundation, can offer is a large body of prior art.
You can watch the occasional patent research question go past the discuss
list when that occurs.

Aside: When projects deal with patent issues and trademark issues it occurs
"off list" as they came up. In the cases I am aware of organisations like
the Free Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation were able to lend a
hand. I assume the project officer would contact the board in this case -
although I am not sure on a private way to contact the board.
--
Jody


Jody Garnett

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 1:43 AM, Jachym Cepicky <jachym.cepicky at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Board mailing list
> > Board at lists.osgeo.org
> > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board
>
>
>
> --
> Jachym Cepicky
> e-mail: jachym.cepicky gmail com
> URL: http://les-ejk.cz
> GPG: http://les-ejk.cz/pgp/JachymCepicky.pgp
>
> Give your code freedom with PyWPS - http://pywps.wald.intevation.org
>
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