[Nfd-dev] Copyright holder section of license boilerplate

[Steve DiBenedetto]

I am not a lawyer (...and I'm not sure anyone on this list is).

Junxiao, I can see where you're coming from and agree with what you're
trying to achieve. However, I think Alex is right. It sounds like you are
trying to enforce an implicit contributor agreement. Implicit is probably a
very bad thing when it comes to legal matters.

The safest/best option is to seek legal counsel. A quick email to the SFLC (
https://www.softwarefreedom.org) might get us on the right track.

Additionally, we should consider having an explicit contributors agreement.
Here are a couple of well known agreement documents:

  Apache: http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt
  Selenium (aka mercurial dvcs tool):
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11Z8LoYpTGUIwCegifVH1YtL9smxVDNk-fOykUZTAWhE/viewform?formkey=dFFjXzBzM1VwekFlOWFWMjFFRjJMRFE6MQ&hl=en_US


-Steve

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 11:15 PM, Junxiao Shi <shijunxiao at email.arizona.edu>
wrote:

> Dear folks
>
> During the review of NFD Task 2352, a question was raised about copyright
> holder in license boilerplates.
>
> My opinion is that every file must carry the same license boilerplate,
> regardless of contributor. The benefit is that the whole NFD repository is
> owned by a single set of copyright holders (the seven institutions), so
> that relicensing is easy.
>
> Alex's opinion is that one people from "NDN team" (which itself is an
> undefined concept) needs to use a standard license boilerplate of seven
> institutions as copyright holders, while other contributors can declare
> different copyright holders without assigning copyright to the seven
> institutions, but still get code merged into NFD repository. I think this
> approach would cause difficulty in relicensing NFD code.
>
> A policy decision on this problem is needed before #2352 can continue.
>
> Yours, Junxiao
>
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