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Posted to dev@ripple.apache.org by Brent Lintner <br...@gmail.com> on 2012/11/15 16:43:55 UTC
Project Copyright?
Hey all,
I was wondering: once the project's codebase is officially contributed
(i.e. pushed) to an ASF git repo, what does this mean for Copyright?
Does the Copyright change from this point onward? Or will it (or should it)
remain as Copyright Research In Motion?
I've poked around the SGA (although I am not a legal guy, lol), and also
looked at a Cordova (Apache) git repo's NOTICE file, which seems to say
that yes, we should..
https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-cordova-android.git;a=blob;f=NOTICE;h=b2157b66ea90bef87a276506335b482f93be1ce5;hb=HEAD
..but I am still not 100% sure, regarding our situation, and would
appreciate any insight into this, and if this is something we will need to
do after contributing the code. :-)
Thanks!
--
Brent
Re: Project Copyright?
Posted by Brent Lintner <br...@gmail.com>.
Thank you very much for the information/clarifications (Jukka & Gord, as
well)! :-)
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Jukka Zitting <ju...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Brent Lintner <br...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I was wondering: once the project's codebase is officially contributed
> > (i.e. pushed) to an ASF git repo, what does this mean for Copyright?
> >
> > Does the Copyright change from this point onward? Or will it (or should
> it)
> > remain as Copyright Research In Motion?
>
> In the legal sense, i.e. who owns the original copyrights to the code,
> nothing changes - the code that was and hopefully will be written by
> RIM remains under its copyright. The only thing that's different is
> the license that RIM and other Ripple contributors grant to the ASF to
> distribute their code under ALv2 or other similar terms.
>
> On the other hand, what does change is this copyright/licensing
> information is documented in source headers and other metadata like
> the LICENSE and NOTICE files in the source tree. See
> http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html as the authoritative
> source of Apache policy on this.
>
> In short, we'll need to change all Ripple source headers to the
> generic Apache header instead of listing any specific copyrights. The
> rationale behind this is that over time we hope many different people
> and companies to contribute to these files, and managing detailed
> copyright records of all those contributions is a waste of time as the
> information is already recorded in the version control and issue
> tracking systems.
>
> The Cordova NOTICE files don't explicitly mention the copyrights of
> various contributors as keeping that information around adds extra
> complexity to downstream distributors (the ALv2 requires them to pass
> on the details in NOTICE). In some other projects though the original
> contributor of a codebase has an entry in the NOTICE file. If RIM
> wants something like that, an extra line like "Based on source code
> originally developed by Research In Motion (http://www.rim.com/)"
> could be added to the Ripple NOTICE along with the standard Apache
> bits.
>
> > ..but I am still not 100% sure, regarding our situation, and would
> > appreciate any insight into this, and if this is something we will need
> to
> > do after contributing the code. :-)
>
> Updating the source headers and other licensing metadata can be done
> either before or after the codebase gets migrated to Apache. The only
> real deadline is that getting these licensing bits in order is a
> precondition to cutting the first release of Apache Ripple.
>
> BR,
>
> Jukka Zitting
>
--
Brent
Re: Project Copyright?
Posted by Jukka Zitting <ju...@gmail.com>.
Hi,
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Brent Lintner <br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wondering: once the project's codebase is officially contributed
> (i.e. pushed) to an ASF git repo, what does this mean for Copyright?
>
> Does the Copyright change from this point onward? Or will it (or should it)
> remain as Copyright Research In Motion?
In the legal sense, i.e. who owns the original copyrights to the code,
nothing changes - the code that was and hopefully will be written by
RIM remains under its copyright. The only thing that's different is
the license that RIM and other Ripple contributors grant to the ASF to
distribute their code under ALv2 or other similar terms.
On the other hand, what does change is this copyright/licensing
information is documented in source headers and other metadata like
the LICENSE and NOTICE files in the source tree. See
http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html as the authoritative
source of Apache policy on this.
In short, we'll need to change all Ripple source headers to the
generic Apache header instead of listing any specific copyrights. The
rationale behind this is that over time we hope many different people
and companies to contribute to these files, and managing detailed
copyright records of all those contributions is a waste of time as the
information is already recorded in the version control and issue
tracking systems.
The Cordova NOTICE files don't explicitly mention the copyrights of
various contributors as keeping that information around adds extra
complexity to downstream distributors (the ALv2 requires them to pass
on the details in NOTICE). In some other projects though the original
contributor of a codebase has an entry in the NOTICE file. If RIM
wants something like that, an extra line like "Based on source code
originally developed by Research In Motion (http://www.rim.com/)"
could be added to the Ripple NOTICE along with the standard Apache
bits.
> ..but I am still not 100% sure, regarding our situation, and would
> appreciate any insight into this, and if this is something we will need to
> do after contributing the code. :-)
Updating the source headers and other licensing metadata can be done
either before or after the codebase gets migrated to Apache. The only
real deadline is that getting these licensing bits in order is a
precondition to cutting the first release of Apache Ripple.
BR,
Jukka Zitting
Re: Project Copyright?
Posted by Gord Tanner <gt...@gmail.com>.
we do it after the code is in the repo.
It is an item that needs to be done before we graduate.
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Brent Lintner <br...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I was wondering: once the project's codebase is officially contributed
> (i.e. pushed) to an ASF git repo, what does this mean for Copyright?
>
> Does the Copyright change from this point onward? Or will it (or should it)
> remain as Copyright Research In Motion?
>
> I've poked around the SGA (although I am not a legal guy, lol), and also
> looked at a Cordova (Apache) git repo's NOTICE file, which seems to say
> that yes, we should..
>
>
> https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-cordova-android.git;a=blob;f=NOTICE;h=b2157b66ea90bef87a276506335b482f93be1ce5;hb=HEAD
>
> ..but I am still not 100% sure, regarding our situation, and would
> appreciate any insight into this, and if this is something we will need to
> do after contributing the code. :-)
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Brent
>