On Feb 4, 2006, at 6:04 AM, David N. Welton wrote:
*) IP clearance checklist - I need to make a copy of that in SVN here, /incubator/site-author/ip-clearance. I'll try and get that done over the weekend.
I have some questions specific to the IP clearance issue for OFBiz. I looked at the legal-discuss mailing list, but it appears to only be open to committers. I have my iCLA on its way, though I'm not sure how long that takes and if I should wait for that to ask this question.
The main question is that while one of the strengths of OFBiz is that there is a good community made up of a number of people and a LOT of people (dozens) who have contributed code to the project, but that also means that if I understand it right the initial license grant is somewhat tricky...
The main resources I've found for the license grant are: http://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt http://incubator.apache.org/ip-clearance/index.htmlUnder the MIT license we have been using there is no assignment or granting of copyright. All of the code is licensed under the MIT license, and the copyright everywhere is listed under "The Open For Business Project". I don't know if this is an issue or not as the Apache license doesn't involve ownership of copyright, just a use license grant and such. Do we need to get any sort of license grant from other contributors? Under the MIT license terms we can add a license to it, but not remove that license, but if read literally the license comes from "The Open For Business Project". So, I guess I'm not sure what we really need in this area...
Are there any guidelines about the size of a code contribution that would necessitate a license grant document?
I guess one way or another we need to go through the commits and pick out who we need to get a document signed by. Before getting started with this we made sure that all current contributors were okay with it, but it is sounding more and more like the group of people who need to sign over a license grant for OFBiz may be pretty large...
So, it is clear that all current committers and those who have contributed larger chunks of code need to sign and submit a license grant, but I'm wondering where we can (or need to) draw the line... For example, if someone submits a patch and we apply it, do we need to get a license grant from that person no matter the size of the patch?
If this is better to put and discuss on the legal-discuss list just let me know and I'll do what is needed to get on that list, or perhaps David, Yoav, or J. Aaron could help with this.
-David
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