[OSGeo-Discuss] Incubation Committee / Contributor Agreements

[Markus Neteler]

For completeness, here the link to the answer from
FrankW to below remarks:
   http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2006-February/021450.html

Markus

On 2/28/06, Markus Neteler <neteler.osgeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/27/06, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
> ...
> > 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.
>
> Below some feedback from the GRASS dev mailing list which I
> simply forward here for further discussion/clarification.
>
> Markus
>
> ############ start FWD ############
> http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2006-February/021449.html
>
> The main issue which I see is that the wording doesn't appear to give
> the submitter any choice over the licence(s) used by the foundation:
>
>   2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
>   this Agreement, You hereby grant to the Foundation and to recipients
>   of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetual, worldwide,
>   non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license
>   to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly
>   perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such
>   derivative works.
>
> This appears to suggest that the foundation can redistribute
> contributions under whichever licence it chooses, the only restriction
> being in the opening paragraph:
>
>   In return, the Foundation shall not use Your Contributions in a way
>   that is contrary to the public benefit or inconsistent with its
>   nonprofit status and bylaws in effect at the time of the
>   Contribution.
>
> Unless the agreement includes a "space" to state a specific licence,
> all contributions will essentially be under a BSD/MIT style licence
> (i.e. permitting the creation of proprietary derivatives).
>
> ############ end FWD ############
>