On 26/03/15 16:36, Roman Shaposhnik wrote: > the project. What I was looking for is a more general statement along the > lines of what Benson has provided earlier on this thread, but coming > from a VP of legal. This is for the purposes of documenting it for future > projects coming to ASF.
From where I'm sitting, I think that the best legal can do is say: "For Groovy, a general signoff on behalf of the Groovy Community is sufficient, but the ideal is for the major contributors to Groovy, and the initial committers to the Apache project, and the Groovy Core Team, and any other stake holders to also signoff on the transfer." Groovy has used AL 2.0 since 2003. That means a decade of code that is AL 2.0 licensed. A license that more or less allows The Apache Foundation to foster the code, regardless of the committers preferences. (The Apache Way considers the committer's preferences to be primary, but even in an adversarial situation, The Apache Foundation would not be in breach of the license.) That scenario is a whole different ball game from a project that had no legal organizational structure ^1 and had changed the license from GPL 3.0 to AL 2.0 less than six months before the project applied to The Apache Foundation as an incubator project. Both of those are different from an organization that had a legal structure, and changed the license from GPL 3.0 to AL 2.0 less than one month before the project applied to The Apache Foundation as an incubator project. In terms of documenting things for future projects coming to ASF, then what is needed is: # Specific project. @ What license it was under prior to applying for incubation: % How long it had used that license for; % Previous licenses that the code was distributed under; @ How the project was governed: % Legal organizational structure, if any; % Informal structure; @ Source Code: % How it was contributed; % How it was merged into the project; % Formal requirements, prior to accepting code; % Informal requirements, prior to accepting code; % How code becomes orphaned; % How contributed code is rejected; % How contributed code is accepted; @ What combination of ICLA, CCLA, and SGA was used: % Formal statements from Legal about the specific transfer; % informal statements from Legal about the specific transfer; I've probably missed a couple of important datapoints. I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. ^1: By "legal organizational structure", I mean an organization that has no paperwork saying it is incorporated. Government issued paperwork that says "Unincorporated Non-Profit Organization", is a legal organizational structure, albeit rare, and poorly understood. jonathon
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