[Incubator] New Application: GeoToolkit

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Christopher Schmidt a écrit :
> The reason for copyright assignment seems to me primarily to be the
> option of re-licensing the code at some point in the future. As a
> developer, I see no particular reason to make it easier for another
> project to take my code, and relicense it in any way they see fit.

Just for information, the option of re-licensing were one reason why we did 
copyright assignment in order to get the option to upgrade from LGPL 2.1 to LGPL 
3.0.

However the coypright assignement that every GeoTools contributor signed, 
explicitly states that if OSGeo re-license GeoTools, then it can only be toward 
an other Open Source license.


> Starting off by saying "How can we make sure GeoTools doesn't use our
> code?" seems like stepping off on the wrong foot.

It has never been my intend in any of my email. If I wrote a sentence saying 
that, then it was a broken English from me. In defense or my faith in Open 
Source, I would point out again the 7 years of email archive on GeoTools.

The concern from the begining was "how to ensure that the referencing code (for 
example) is known as geotoolkit work (or derivative work)" (assuming that code 
get incorporated in GeoTools) given that they were until yesterday no copyright 
statement other than "OSGeo". They were two reasons why I wanted to avoid adding 
such statement:

   - Avoid making the relicensing to LGPL 3 harder.

   - For preaching by example. Advantage of "Copyright OSGeo" is
     that it is much easier to ask external contributors to give
     their copyright to OSGeo (under the same condition as we did
     for GeoTools - see above) than asking them to give it to any
     proprietary compagny. And it is yet easier to ask them to
     trust OSGeo is we do the same ourself.

As said in previous email, possible approaches include:

   - Keeping "(C) Geomatys" forever (would violate the above goals)
   - Keeping "(C) Geomatys" for one year (starting a new cycle every year)
   - Credits in some pages like the ones you mentioned.

	Martin