Author and copyright citation within shindig contributions

[Martin Webb <ma...@gmail.com>]

What is the shindig/apache policy for author and copyright citation
within contributions?

I've seen mention (but cannot find an example), of citations being
removed with the suggestion that authorship can be found by checking
who made the change in svn.

This does not help with patches (large or small) that are applied by
someone other than the contributor - due to lack of commit access.

It does not help (as far as I can see) with code changes made outside
of svn in another repository (possibly a company repo) that includes
shindig code when later we need to identify company changes from
shindig changes (for the company's own derivative works) - where we
also still want to contribute back company changes to shindig (as
author/copyright citations will be removed - potentially time and time
again?)

We have a rather large contribution (a feature-rich example Java
container) that we'd like to donate back...

Regards
Martin

Re: Author and copyright citation within shindig contributions

[Santiago Gala <sa...@gmail.com>]

I AM NOT A LAWYER, just some random pointers and talk.

El jue, 01-05-2008 a las 00:53 +0100, Martin Webb escribió:
> What is the shindig/apache policy for author and copyright citation
> within contributions?
> 

No author tags in code, as they are messy. There is a NOTICE file for
mandatory attributions, and typically contributions are listed in some
sort of changelog or README.

> I've seen mention (but cannot find an example), of citations being
> removed with the suggestion that authorship can be found by checking
> who made the change in svn.
> 
> This does not help with patches (large or small) that are applied by
> someone other than the contributor - due to lack of commit access.
> 

Yeah, I don't like the fact that there is no simple, automated way to
distinguish those cases without resort to external tools (the issue
tracker ID or some text in the commit log comment). Lately we have
started quoting the author in the commit message, but a distinction like
the one that git has between author and committer would help.

> It does not help (as far as I can see) with code changes made outside
> of svn in another repository (possibly a company repo) that includes
> shindig code when later we need to identify company changes from
> shindig changes (for the company's own derivative works) - where we
> also still want to contribute back company changes to shindig (as
> author/copyright citations will be removed - potentially time and time
> again?)
> 

The ASF does not require a copyright assignment, just a "generous
enough" license. Actually code can be donated and kept at the same time,
something that sounds sort of magic but is true. Basically your company
grants the ASF a non-revokeable, non-exclusive sublicenseable license
with a certain set of conditions, and you can keep the code under
whatever conditions you want.

I'm not sure why would a company want to distinguish beyond an initial
donation, as the company can use the code in whatever way they want
(basically except for the patent condition and the right to revoke the
license rights to the ASF) after each contribution.

The ASF is about community development, so a code drop that is not meant
to be maintained by the project team has big possibilities of not being
accepted. Also, once it is accepted, we would probably expect that
people involved in this area of the project would stay on list
discussing feature changes and/or bug fixes, in both directions. We
definitely don't expect getting a patch dropped every, say, six months.
Such a process would get out of synchrony very quickly, basically not
work.

> We have a rather large contribution (a feature-rich example Java
> container) that we'd like to donate back...
> 

Apart from technical acceptance, that sort of contribution should go
through the IP vetting procedures. I'm no expert, as shindig is the
first incubation project I'm involved with, but I've seen a number of
cases pass by in different lists. I suggest to take a serious look into
http://www.apache.org/licenses/ ,
http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#incubator , and
specially http://incubator.apache.org/ip-clearance/index.html , make
your lawyers look into the issues too, and I hope some ASFer with more
knowledge about the issues steps in and continues the explanations. 


Regards
Santiago

> Regards
> Martin
-- 
Santiago Gala
http://memojo.com/~sgala/blog/