24 Mar
2009
24 Mar
'09
11:20 p.m.
On Mar 17, 2009, at 11:28 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
Hi devs,
In the early days of XWiki, we used to put @author tags inside Java
source files. Later on, we decided that this is a bad practice, and
started removing them, on the premise that we will have a NOTICE file
listing all authors and contributors. And although we managed to
remove
almost all @author tags, the NOTICE file doesn't list any developers
or
contributors, listing just XWiki as a company as the copyright holder.
This would be OK if we had a policy stating that all Intellectual
Properties belong to XWiki. But we don't.
So, shouldn't we make an official policy? Here are some alternatives:
I. Individual copyright
- we list developers
- we list all contributors and their contributions
- contributors retain the IP for their submitted code
II. Collective copyright
- we list developers
- we list all contributors and their contributions
- XWiki as a collective is the only copyright holder, and we specify
that any submitted patch will be the property of the community
- having a non-profit organization would help
+1. This is what we are doing except that we are missing CLA/CCLA and
signed versions for all committers.
See http://www.apache.org/licenses/
(http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt)
Note that it's not legal to take copyright on behalf of someone else
in lots of countries. What apache does is that the copyright holder
(the creator of the contribution) gives the right
".. to the Foundation and to
recipients of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of,
publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your
Contributions and such derivative works.
"
+ patents stuff.
The copyright remains the property of the original author or of its
company if the company has IP on his work.
So we need to create a CLA/CCLA and have them signed by all committers.
Thanks
-Vincent
III. Umbrella copyright with acknowledgments
- we don't list developers
- we list all contributors (including devs)
- XWiki SAS as a company is the only copyright holder, and we specify
that any submitted patch will be copyrighted by XWiki
IV. Umbrella copyright, no acknowledgments
- we don't list developers or contributors (in the pom, the web hall
of
fame can and should still exist)
- XWiki SAS is the only copyright, and we specify that any submitted
patch will be copyrighted by XWiki
Currently we're doing IV, but we don't make this explicit. I'd vote
for
II, as this is a more Open way.
On the technical side, Maven already provides support for listing
contributors and developers, for the moment these sections are
empty. We
can change the NOTICE template to automatically list them.
An important question is where do we list people?
- In the parent pom, which implies frequent releases of the parent,
which means frequent version changes for all the other modules.
- In each project's pom, which means that new contributions will only
require releasing the affected module, but it will be harder, if not
impossible, to aggregate contributions.
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu/