[Incubator] Transfering Code Copyright - restart

[Frank Warmerdam]

rich at richsteele.org wrote:
> However, if you can only get, say, 70% of the developers who contributed 
> to a project, then you would need to take a hard look at what that other 
> 30% contributed.  Does the foundation have sufficient rights to that 
> code under some license? Did the contributor have the right to 
> contribute the code?  was it his/her code or did he/she commit someone 
> else's code?  Basically, we'll need to do some due diligence on the 
> provenance of the code and determine whether it is kosher, "semi-kosher" 
> and thus not likely to result in legal problems down the road, or 
> problematic and thus probably should be removed/rewritten.

Rich,

Agreed.  That is the review process we already have in place.  For instance
the GeoTools team has already pretty much completed a review of the GeoTools
code base.  They have dropped a few items that clearly didn't belong,
and clarified the status of somethings that seemed questionable.

However, the working assumption in this type of review is that if
the code was originally directly provided to GeoTools by it's original
developer, under the LGPL and labelled as (c) Geotools project, then
it was intentionally and correctly contributed.

That is to say this sort of review takes the position that code is
assumed properly contributed unless there can be found some sort of
sign that it might not have been.

So, when we find in the headers that a snippet was copied from some
other project, then things are looked into.  If a file is contributed
without clear licensing, then that gets tracked back to the contributor.
If a data file is derived from some other source (such as EPSG) then we
review that we are within our rights.

As you point out this is a risk management strategy.  For instance, someone
who provided a bug fix for GeoTools could come back years later and claim
they never intended for that fix to be redistributed, assigned, etc.  At
that point all we can do is remove their code.

> Yes, the form of copyright assignment I sent around is very broad, as it 
> covers past and future contributions, and covers code contributed to ALL 
> foundation projects.  For example, if you wanted to contribute your GDAL 
> code, but nothing else, you could make it specific.  For other projects, 
> you might have to sign a CLA if that PSC required it.  Similarly, the 
> GeoTools folks would probably want to limit their contribution to 
> GeoTools code.  We can create different versions of the form if that is 
> what is intended.

OK, it seems it should be fairly easy to modify the definition of
contribution to at least be project specific.

Best regards,
-- 
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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