Re: OSGeo incubation status

> On 10 Sep 2019, at 11:55, Even Rouault <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On mardi 10 septembre 2019 08:15:53 CEST Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
>> On 9/10/19 8:08 AM, Kristian Evers wrote:
>>> We have a bunch of files without a license header present. The copyright
>>> holder is inferred from the git log. Should we add headers to those
>>> files? 
> 
> Adding a copyright & license header on behalf of someone else is probably 
> something we should not do without their explicit consent. As the project has 
> a general COPYING file, that should cover those cases. I remember having seen 
> discussions on the Incubation mailing list where it was said that having a 
> per-file copyright&license information wasn't an obligation (I believe OSGeo 
> received legal advice regarding this, but my memory can be wrong)
> 
> That said, I'd find it a good practice to require new contributions to have an 
> explicit header.

Let’s leave it at that. New files are required to include the license text at the top.
I’ll find somewhere relevant to put that info.

> 
>>> Also, in many files substantial work has been done by several
>>> developers, even though only one is stated as the copyright holder. I
>>> assume because the developer has forgotten to add their name in the
>>> header. We can also infer those from git, but is that something that we
>>> ought to do?
>> 
>> You'll have assess whether the changes are eligible for copyright from
>> the diff, as trivial changes aren't copyrightable.
>> 
>> You don't have to add every author of changes, if they don't add a
>> copyright statement of their own, they may have just chosen to wave
>> their claim and implicitly grant it to the project.
> 
> I'm in line with Bas here. Retracing all activity in each file and determine 
> which one is worth being copyrighted would be a lot of work.

Definitely af lot of work. And I am happy to not do it if it is not required.

> 
> I believe one of the main purposes of this provenance review is to check that 
> we don't have files explicitly under a proprietary license or under an 
> incompatible open source license (that's how I perceive
> GDAL's https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/master/gdal/PROVENANCE.TXT was 
> established)
> 

…and as far as I can tell we don’t have any problems. I will fill out the list
of copyright holders when I need a break from other work. With that, I think
we can declare the provenance review done. The logo is then the only thing
missing before we can submit the checklist to the incubation committee.

/Kristian

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