[Incubator] Transfering Code Copyright - restart

[Frank Warmerdam]

Jennifer Daehler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Hopefully this input will be helpful.
> 
> 1.  Project (c) assignment to OSGeo.  
> 
> My understanding (based on early conversations with Rich Steele and
> based on the draft Contributor License Agreements proposed for OSGeo) is
> that the original thinking was that the intellectual property rights to
> the code for the various projects would be licensed to OSGeo by all
> authors of the code, rather than assigned. License and assignment are 2
> different things and each model has pros and cons.  

Jennifer,

My understanding is that neither licensing (via a contributor agreement
nor by assignment) is strictly necessary as long as the code is all
properly under an OSI license.  That license already gives the
foundation the right to redistribute the code as long as it does not
alter the copyright or license conditions in place.

Furthermore that the contributor agreement was primarily seen as being
useful in that it would grant the foundation to alter licenses for code,
and perhaps to give it some sort of standing in code to protect the
project if needed.

Earlier in the year it was decided to not pursue contributor agreements
because they give a rather dubious benefit and require a fair amount
of paperwork to chase people down to sign the agreements.  Some projects
also felt uncomfortable giving the foundation the power to alter the
license on a project - especially I think a concern that GPLed projects
might be changed to a weaker license against the wishes of the original
contributors.

But while we decided we wouldn't require contributor agreements across
the board, it was still considered ok for specific projects to require
them.  Rich felt that MapGuide Open Source would still likely require them
from it's contributors.  So at that point we are already lacking
consistency. :-)

We also were not intending to require copyright assignment, but to
allow it where desired.  For projects like Geotools, GRASS and MapBuilder
(I think) the code has been setup with a copyright message attributing
the copyright to non-legal entities.  Ie. GeoTools Development team,
GRASS development team, etc.  In this case assignment was seen as a
way of cleaning up the situation and assigning the code to an actual
legal entity.

Alternatively, in theory, we could try and track through fix the headers
to name the specific contributors as copyright holders on a module by
module basis.  But this seems contrary to the original intent of placing
the code into the hands of the "project", and also very difficult to do
accurately after the fact.

For those file copyrighted by me, I was also thinking of assigning them
to the foundation as a statement of faith, without requiring that it be
done for all GDAL files.  But given the complexity, I'm not sure I want to
pursue that for the time being.

---

All that said the next step for GeoTools seems to be for them to take
a copyright assignment letter to as many contributors as they can
identify.  Can you provide some sort of template copyright assignment
letter we should use?  Since it is hard to identify specific files I
am hoping that each contributor could sign a letter indicating that
copyright for all their contributions that are in the GeoTools SVN
repository as of a particular date (perhaps also with an url
identifying the SVN repository in question) are to be assigned to the
foundation.  Is that a reasonable approach?

Once they have such a template letter, they can get people to start
printing them, signing them, and mailing them to OSGeo for storage
somewhere.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org