[mapguide-internals] Source provenance review
Daniel Morissette
dmorissette at mapgears.com
Tue Feb 6 17:07:46 EST 2007
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/
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