[Incubator] Communication ~= progress

[Frank Warmerdam]

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> Following on from my comments in IRC,
> Regarding assignment of copywrite. At the following meeting, it was 
> argued by Eric Raymond, then passed that Contributor License Agreements 
> (CLA)s are not required by projects.
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/IncCom_Meeting2
> 
> I think this is different to geotools' situation which requires 
> retrospective re-assignment of copywrite to OSGeo.

Cameron,

Correct.  That discussion was whether a contributor license agreement
is necessary for projects where the original developer retains the
copyright (as in most projects).  The answer from Rich Steele was that
having a CLA puts the organization in a stronger legal position but is
not strictly necessary.  We decided (within the incubator) not to require
projects (like GDAL for instance) to require a CLA if they do not desire
one.

Since then we have set forth a policy in the incubator that projects
without a CLA need to at least have committers agree to (not on paper)
to some sort of committer guidelines that make their responsibilities
reasonably clear, such as those at:

   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Commiter_Responsibilities_Guidelines

This leaves us with three likely models for contributors in OSGeo:

1) copyright holder retains copyright, but signs a strong CLA (MapGuide,
FDO, OpenLayers?)

2) copyright holder retains copyright, but only is only expected to follow
reasonable contribution guidelines to keep IP clean.  (GDAL, MapServer)

3) copyright holder turns over copyright to the foundation which
requires a signed legal assignment on paper. (proposed for GeoTools)

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