[Incubator] Transfering Code Copyright - restart

[rich at richsteele.org]

Quoting Markus Neteler <neteler.osgeo at gmail.com>:

> Rich, all,
>
> I am rather sure that this passage:
>
> " 2. License Terms. OSGeo will make the Contributions available under
> a license certified by the Open Source Initiative and may also make
> the Contributions available under other license terms.
> "
>
> from the proposed document will not be accepted by various
> GRASS developers (see earlier discussion). The issue is that
> this passage (to my understanding) implies that GPL'ed code
> can be changes to, say, MIT license.

Markus,

I think you may be missing the point.  This is a copyright assignment  
for those persons who want to give total ownership of their code to  
the foundation.  If the foundation owns the code, it can essentially  
do with it what it wants.  The GRASS developers who earlier complained  
about the breadth of the contributor license agreement would not be  
the intended signatories of this agreement -- clearly if they wouldn't  
sign the CLA, they wouldn't sign a document giving someone else  
ownership over their contributions.  For GRASS, I think it has been  
settled that: (i) contributions will continue to be owned by the  
individual developer; (ii) those contributions will be licensed by the  
developer under the GPL; and (iii) no CLA will be required by the  
GRASS PSC.

The copyright assignment form is only for those folks like Frank and  
others who have expressed an interest in simply donating the code  
outright to OSGeo.

Thanks,

Rich