[DISCUS] Software Grants/IP Clearance (was Re: Gobblin Incubator Meetup/Video Conference)

["John D. Ament" <jo...@apache.org>]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 12:52 AM Olivier Lamy <ol...@apache.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> So moving forward on Gobblin, (yeah finally software grant bottleneck
> unlock!!).
>

I'm glad you've mentioned this subject.  TBH, based on some of the
discussions that have happened on list, I'm a bit confused why Gobblin
needed a Software Grant Agreement.  Was there a specific ask from the prior
owner to declare a grant?  It looks like Gobblin was always Apache
Licensed.  I don't believe I saw a question raised on this list about the
grant.

From reading through [1] it's clear that the grants within the document are
meant to be equivalent to the Apache License, v2.  This is useful when the
incoming code base is *not* Apache Licensed, however Gobblin was already
Apache Licensed so really all this did was allow us to change the first
line to read "Licensed to the ASF" instead of the original copyright holder
(which is really OK).

I also think it's useful when accepting such a large grant that it has to
go through an initial IP Clearance.  This will help make the first release
much smoother, and allow us to identify any code that should not have been
granted, sorting through any inappropriate headers.

I plan to start to update guides around this, with a "choose your journey"
style question/answer to guide users into the right path for SGAs, IP
Clearance and the such.

John

[1]: https://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt



>
> Cheers
> --
> Olivier Lamy
> http://twitter.com/olamy | http://linkedin.com/in/olamy
>