[Incubator] Application for Community Project Status for the mappyfile project

[Jody Garnett]

Thanks for the discussion, even if it is a delay between messages, comments
inline..

On Fri, 14 Feb 2020 at 14:33, Seth G <sethg at geographika.co.uk> wrote:

> With regard to copyright I noticed a few different styles:
>
> - Short copyright header e.g. in pywps:
> https://github.com/geopython/pywps/blob/master/pywps/configuration.py
> - Full copyright header: e.g. in pygeoapi:
> https://github.com/geopython/pygeoapi/blob/master/tests/load_es_data.py
> - No copyright header: e.g. in Shapely
> https://github.com/Toblerity/Shapely/blob/master/shapely/coords.py
>
> I went with the full header (a few of the source files have joint
> authorship), but only on the sourcecode *.py files, not on all the test
> files. Does join authorship imply joint copyright? Or if the second author
> agrees can it be a single copyright?
>

The second author has copyright also (on whatever lines they contributed).
You can do something formal (like the OSGeo Contributor License Agreement
<https://www.osgeo.org/about/licenses/>) to pass things over to another
party if needed.

I find it easiest to list the first author, and they say "and others..." as
more folks contribute (can always check git history to figure out who
specifically added to the file).

The key thing is to have copyright around to use as a tool to enforce your
open source license (if you find a violation of those terms).

While reviewing the authorship I have run into something I'm unsure how to
> best deal with. The file
> https://github.com/geographika/mappyfile/blob/master/mappyfile/ordereddict.py
> is based on an implementation of an OrderedDict from StackOverflow which is
> in turn based on another piece of code on the web. I found the authors
> names and added them to the header (and already had links to the
> implementations). The code has since been modified by myself a few times,
> and is a fairly standard way of implementing OrderedDicts, but I did use
> their approach as a starting point.  Is there anything I have to do in this
> case?
>

That is a great example, some background:
a) stack overflow changed its terms so code snippets
<https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange>
would be open source MIT license in 2016
b) Anything on stack overflow before that date is probably a mess (they
tried using an open documentation CCbyA license or something)

After arguing with projects that care about such things I recommend leaving
the original header intact, and add your own to it... does the original
have a license or header?

Found a faq
<http://code.activestate.com/help/faq/#what-is-the-license-of-a-particular-code-recipe>,
and your header does a great job of reporting the original location as
"Licensed under the PSF License" -->
https://docs.python.org/3/license.html which
is OSI approved etc...

So you cannot "take away" the terms of the PSF license; this one file would
remain with those PSF terms.

Here is an example of how we handled one of these things for GeoTools:
https://github.com/geotools/geotools/blob/master/modules/library/main/src/main/java/org/geotools/feature/type/DateUtil.java
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/incubator/attachments/20200228/78b59f91/attachment.html>