[OSGeo-Discuss] Incubation Committee / Contributor Agreements

[Cameron Shorter]

The first thing we are going to need to do is contact all our developers 
and ask them to assign copywrite.  What would be good is a plain English 
description of the license and the reason for it which we can all use.

Secondly, I'm not sure what we do about libraries we import into our 
code.  Do we need the library developers to sign the same copywrite forms?

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> 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,


-- 
Cameron Shorter
http://cameron.shorter.net