[xwiki-devs] Listing developers and contributors, copyright policy
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 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/
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 23:28, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> 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
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)
url: There is a list on http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/HallOfFame
- 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.
II sounds good
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.
It's possible but more complex for sure. For me project's pom is not the same that each module pom, any contribution to XE would be listed in the root XE pom, same for core which hold all the components. But IMO this is for contributors, committers should go to XWiki root pom.xml since it's not modified all the time and it reflect the committers responsibility (even most of the committers did not contributed to each XWiki module).
-- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/ _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Thomas Mortagne
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/
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
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)
IMO, the Hall of Fame could do with some more updating.
- 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.
On Mar 25, 2009, at 11:44 AM, Eduard Moraru wrote:
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
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)
IMO, the Hall of Fame could do with some more updating.
Definitely. Please add what you see is missing. We should all do this to ensure it's of good quality. This is not legal reasons BTW it's only for recognition of our contributors/committers. For legal there are svn logs which prove what everyone has contributed (for committers and normally for contributors too since we have the practice to always say "patch submitted by XXX, reviewed by XXX with following changed:". Thanks -Vincent
- 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.
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
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 Thanks, Marius
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.
participants (5)
-
Eduard Moraru -
Marius Dumitru Florea -
Sergiu Dumitriu -
Thomas Mortagne -
Vincent Massol