From: Adrian C. <ac...@gm...> - 2007-12-30 10:00:27
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On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 10:21 +0100, Andrea Aime wrote: > Adrian Custer ha scritto: > > Hey all, > > > > Heather Meeker gave us a present for the new year! We have a draft > > copyright assignment agreement which you can see at: > > > > http://docs.codehaus.org/download/attachments/9765352/010-GtCopyright-HJMversion_FINAL.odt > > Hi, > I'm reading the contribution agreement and I'm surprised... it actually > makes sense to me! :) > > Looks good, yet I have some questions: > * page one states: "except where exercise of rights in the Contribution > as part of the Geotools Project is not feasible without such > modification or combination." Ok, here I lost you. Examples? Okay, patents are the hardest part of this and, if people we want as Contributors start complaining, we may simply drop that language. The key here is we want to make contributors only give us stuff we can build on i.e. they can't give us stuff and then say "oh, and if you want to make that code useful, you need a patent". "licensed patent" == stuff we could infringe while using or building on geotools which, later in the agreement, the Contributors license to everyone. This EXCLUDES further work, unrelated to any existing work, that itself infringes on the patent (otherwise we would simply be liberating all the Contributor's patents). However, the EXCLUSION DOES NOT COVER further work that is related to the current library and is necessary to use the Submission. example, a Contributor gives us some very good star mapping code but has a (bad) patent essentially covering the algorithm converting star locations to earth positions. (e.g. "a buisness method to convert a geographic position to a celestial ray using an epoch") but doesn't contribute any code for that. If we want to use the star mapping code, we have to 'infringe' on their patent so the Contributor, by giving us their code, also grants us a 'right to infringe' their patent. This protects a Contributor's patents that have nothing to do with our code while preventing submarine patents > * page 3, section "V", states: "or any substantially similar license > that meets the Open Source Definition or Free Software Definition". > I feel this may be quite open to interpretation? There is nothing > drawing the line of what is "substantially similar". yes, legal work is *not* code so it's impossible to square things completely but leave any flexibility. Either we freeze the license or we leave wiggle room subject to intepretation. It's open to interpretation and we trust that judges will 'get it' and interpret this according to the gist of the free software movement. There's no way to draw a line and yet leave room for the gplv4, at least none that I have found and I'm tired of looking. > > The rest looks pretty good to me. > > > Going forward, we need to: > > > > The best we can hope for is to give one organisation > > most of the copyright to the code since some past > > authors have already stated they will not sign any > > agreement. For future contributions, we can decide if we > > want to force or merely recommend that authors sign the > > document. > > Right, what do we do with parts that we can't cover due to past > authors refusing to sign? Remove from the source code base? > Or can we ask these past authors to relicense their code to the public > domain and then grab it back? (would that work?) No, we use their code, like we use jts, as licensees. We should identify that code so we don't violate its license terms and can drop it eventually if we want to. However, essentially that code is licensed to all under the lgplv2, so the foundation uses it as a licensee and everyone else, including us, use it as sub-licensees of the foundation. > > > 3) Do all the grunt work to GRADUATE. > > > > Get the document signed by as many people as possible, > > change the headers, slave under Jody's direction to redo > > the provenance review, bleed, cry and commit. > > LOL. Sounds good to me. > Cheers > Andrea |