[OSGeo-Board] Re: [Incubator] Feedback from gt2 on contributors agreement.

[Rich Steele]

Chris Holmes wrote:

> Ok, this works from the foundation's perspective, but what remains
> unclear is from _his_ perspective.  If the only place one can get at
his
> code is through the foundation/geotools, which has an LGPL license,
then
> he could get in trouble with his employer.

I can't offer an opinion on what, if anything, his federal employer
requires in the way of making his software actually (rather than
legally) available to the public.  Legally speaking, there is no
requirement to affirmatively "make it public domain", since there simply
is no statutory copyright protection for works that he creates in his
capacity as an employee of the federal government.  Typically, the
moment that a work is created, a copyright interest attaches under the
copyright act.  For government works, this doesn't happen, so there is
nothing that needs to be done to contribute it to the public domain.  

Thus, the employee cannot "license" those public domain works to the
foundation.  But he can send them to the foundation as public domain
works, and then the foundation in turn can incorporate these public
domain works into a collective work over which the foundation has the
copyright.  

> Basically I think what we're
> looking for is either some mechanism where he can say in the license
> that his work is available to all, or a place to release his code
> available to all in parallel with the LGPL release.  Or assurance that
> he's in the clear if he just releases as LGPL.  We want him to be a
> happy contributor, able to commit to our svn repository, on his paid
> time, and not be worried about getting in trouble for only releasing
his
> code as LGPL.

It may be academic since there appears to be a popular revolt against
the idea of having a contributor agreement in the first place (at least
in some communities), but I think it would be fine to customize this
person's contributor agreement to acknowledge that certain code
contributed to the foundation (e.g., that which is written on the
government's dime) is public domain and not subject to the license.

-Rich