[OpenLayers-Dev] OpenLayers CLA Metacarta vs OSGEO

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 03:02:24PM +0200, Pierre GIRAUD wrote:
> Hi all, and in particular PSC members,
> 
> Currently, each person (alone or with a company) who wants to
> contribute to OpenLayers must sign a CLA.
> http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/HowToContribute
> 
> It is said that "OpenLayers copyright will remain MetaCarta's until
> OSGEO is ready to assume ownership".

This statement is no longer valid; wiki pages are slow to match reality
:)

> Does it mean that we were waiting for OpenLayers to graduate from
> OSGEO incubation ?

OpenLayers has graduated incubation.

> Should the CLA beneficiary be modified ?

No.

> Is OSGEO ready to assume ownership ?

Based on discussion at FOSS4G, it was agreed among the PSC members that
transferring copyright to OSGeo was not an important step to moving
forward with the project. There are a couple reasons for this:

 * OSGeo has limited resources, and the task of transferring
   the copyright was seen as being a burden that it was unneccesary to
   place on OSGeo.
 * MetaCarta was -- with the agreement on the "Clear BSD" license --
   happy to continue to act as the copyright holder on OpenLayers. Once 
   we established with OSGeo that this was acceptable to become an
   incubated project, there was not any reason brought up that it was
   important to switch over the copyright.

At this time, MetaCarta is continuing to act as copyright holder, acting
on behalf of the PSC as custodian. 

Is there any particular concern about this? If this is causing some kind
of problem, we can discuss it, but up until now, we've essentially
considered the problem 'handled', and felt no further need to pursue a
change of copyright away from MetaCarta. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta