Incubation Committee / Contributor Agreements

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

Today the Board initiated an Incubator Committee.  The basic role of the
incubator is to do various sorts of review of projects as they join the
foundation.  This includes IP review (is all the code cleanly under an
OS license?), arranging setup or approval of a project steering committee
with appropriate governance, and ensuring that committers sign appropriate
contributor agreements.

Some information on the Incubation Committee can be found at:

   http://incubator.osgeo.org/

At the preceeding board meeting it was decided that all founding projects
would go through the incubation process, not just new projects added in the
future.  To that end we (the incubation committee) need one official
representative on the incubation committee from each of the seven founding
projects.  I believe that we already have MapGuide Open Source (Bob Bray),
GDAL/OGR (Frank Warmerdam), and GeoServer (Chris Holmes) represented.  Other
projects should select a representative for the incubation committee.  Please
contact me with the selected person.

One of the first items of discussion for incubation is the Committer
Agreements.  These are legal documents that anyone with CVS/SVN commit
access must sign.  Basically they provide the foundation the right to
redistribute the provided code, and to defend the code in case of litigation.
But it does require the committer and possibly their employer to agree that
they have the right to provide code they are committing to the project.

The board has reviewed a proposed committer agreement based loosely on
the Apache committer agreement.  Now we are looking for broader feedback on
it the agreements.  Of most interest is feedback from significant code
contributors.   The draft agreements are available at:

   http://www.fossgis.de/osgeo/index.php/Contributor_Agreement

Feedback may be to this mailing list, or to the incubation committee via
project representatives there.

Best regards,
-- 
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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    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent