[Nfd-dev] Copyright holder section of license boilerplate

[Burke, Jeff]

An explicit contributor agreement is needed and should address this issue; this question should probably be directed to the PIs responsible for NFD before contacting SFLC since the team is in contact with them on other matters already.

jeff


From: Steve DiBenedetto <dibenede at cs.colostate.edu<mailto:dibenede at cs.colostate.edu>>
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2015 09:48:16 -0700
To: Junxiao Shi <shijunxiao at email.arizona.edu<mailto:shijunxiao at email.arizona.edu>>
Cc: "<nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu<mailto:nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu>>" <nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu<mailto:nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Nfd-dev] Copyright holder section of license boilerplate

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<mailto: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

_______________________________________________
Nfd-dev mailing list
Nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu<mailto:Nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu>
http://www.lists.cs.ucla.edu/mailman/listinfo/nfd-dev


_______________________________________________ Nfd-dev mailing list Nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu<mailto:Nfd-dev at lists.cs.ucla.edu> http://www.lists.cs.ucla.edu/mailman/listinfo/nfd-dev
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.lists.cs.ucla.edu/pipermail/nfd-dev/attachments/20150108/f7ebee06/attachment.html>