[GRASS5] GRASS Project Steering Committee and more

[Michael Tiemann]

On Sat, 2006-02-11 at 01:36 +0000, Glynn Clements wrote:
> Markus Neteler wrote:
> 
> > o One benefit of the foundation is some degree of legal
> >    support and protection for the project. The flip side of that
> >    is that the foundation needs to ensure some degree of
> >    rigor and process in how code comes into the project. One
> >    part of that is getting committers to sign a legal agreement
> >    indicating that they agree that changes they commit will
> >    be under the license of GRASS (GPL) and that they have 
> >    the right to submit the code (they wrote it, it is not
> >    patented, have permission from their employer, etc).
> 
> Regarding the "not patented" bit, I hope that they are only asking for
> a declaration that the author isn't aware of any applicable patents,
> not indemnity against "accidental" infringment.

That's how I'd interpret it.  Moreover, when I submitted code to the
FSF, I recall saying that I did not knowingly infringe any patents.  I
believe that's good enough, and I also believe that there are companies
and consortia who have committed to defend such contributions to open
source based on such good-faith representations.

M