[mapguide-internals] Source provenance review

[Daniel Morissette]

I was reviewing the MapGuide Provenance Review and doing some spot 
checks in the 1.1 source package and have a few questions/comments for 
the PSC:

1- License.htm

The source package comes with a License.htm that contains a copy of the 
MapGuide License (LGPL) and of the specific licenses of some of the 
packages under Oem. However not all packages are listed. If we're going 
to list some licenses there, we should probably list all of them for 
completeness and make sure we maintain that file in the future.

I noticed that there are no mentions of the following packages in 
License.htm:

- DWFTK
- SQLite
- FDO
- dbxml

Should they be added?

2- Should there be a README file (or README.TXT to be more 
Windows-friendly) in the root of the source package introducing MapGuide 
and pointing to the license file, build/install instructions, etc? For 
some distribution packaging guidelines, see: 
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-HOWTO/distpractice.html

3- The links to the licenses (old online source browser) are all broken 
in the code provenance review document at 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/MapGuide_Provenance_Review
Should we update the links to point to 
https://svn.osgeo.org/svn/mapguide/trunk/MgDev/?

4- Most (all?) of the html/js/php files do not contain a 
copyright/license header. I believe this is fine, but I think it was 
agreed in the last IRC meeting that a single copyright/license file 
would be added per directory where those files reside. Is this still the 
plan? Perhaps that should be noted in the code provenance review and 
added to the project's TODO list?

5- The current copyright holder on most files is Autodesk. What is the 
plan for future contributions? Will the copyright holder in the source 
file header be the individual who created the file, or will the 
copyright be assigned to OSGeo (or ADSK?)?

6- I tried to answer #5 above myself by reviewing the CLA, but that only 
led to another question: The CLA applies to "Your present and future 
Contributions submitted to the Foundation" without any specific mention 
of the MapGuide project. Am I right in my understanding that if a 
developer signs this CLA today for the MapGuide project, the CLA 
automatically extents to any Foundation project? Is this really the 
intention, is this a good thing? I would have thought that a CLA should 
have been project-specific and not apply to every contribution of an 
individual made to the Foundation. (As you can tell I'm not a lawyer, 
sorry if that's a dumb question)


Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/