[Incubator] Copyright held by non-legal entities

[Jody Garnett]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> rich at richsteele.org wrote:
> > Frank wrote:
>>> Currently most of the Geotools code has the copyright held by the
>>> "Geotools PMC", which has no legal existence as far as I know.  How
>>> much of a problem is this likely to be?
>>
>> A non-entity can't hold copyright, so the copyright is still vested 
>> in the individual creators of the code.  Did prior creators sign a 
>> purported copyright assignment to the "Geotools PMC"?
> Rich,
> I don't believe they signed any copyright assignment to the PMC.
Well they have placed headers assigning (C) to the PMC at the top of 
their files with the understanding that the community process
will steer their code in a useful direction, I have CCed James and 
Martin as some of the origional founders to see if they can tell us 
anything new...
>> Are we talking about an actual assignment of the copyright to OSGeo, 
>> or simply a license?  Either way, the PMC members and previous 
>> members/contributors should sign a copyright assignment form or a 
>> broad license agreement (ie., the contributor agreement)
> Could you point us at a sample copyright assignment form that we could 
> use?  We were thinking of copyright assignment in this case I believe. 
Yes that would be a plan, we got no chance of hunting down all members, 
but the code is grouped into modules each of which have a single 
maintainer who was responsible for applying submitted patches and the like.
> I'd also like to proceed with copyright assignment for my code in GDAL.
Nice, will give us two projects to establish the process with.
Jody