Re: [udig-devel] uDig at location meeting and assorted other admin stuff

[Jody Garnett <jody.garnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

TLDR: Copyright and license are fine. We are trying to phone Refractions to be poliet.  

For me the first *MANDATORY* step was to get the copyright issues solved with Refractions. Without that it would make no sense to start.

Not sure how much of that issue is; normally with a license like LGPL or EPL we can copy the code and track the (c) history in the headers. Further work (and the version 1.0 codebase) would say something along the lines of

/*******************************************************************************

 * Copyright (c) 2012 Eclipse Foundation and others.

 *

 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials

 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0

 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at

 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html

 *

 * Contributors:

 *     Eclipse Foundation - javadoc and api review

 *     Jody Garnett - Bug 12342 Slow start up on Mac OSX 

 *     Refractions Research - initial API and implementation

 *******************************************************************************/

Translating the above (you read it in reverse order):

- the class was initially defined by Refraction Research  

- Jody fixed a bug (this is an example of how you can track contributors on patch by patch basis without asking them to sign a contribution agreement required for adhoc commit access)

- Eclipse Foundation (that would be us acting as part of the eclipse foundation) would do a javadoc and header check locking down as many public methods as we could

- the license the file is being provided to the current user looking at the file is EPL. The fact that Refractions currently provides it under LGPL does not really enter into it as the license is compatible in that respect LGPL --> EPL.

If you are curious the "and others" would include Refractions. I am used to the style of listing all (c) holders; but could not quickly find an eclipse example were this was done - they seem to have a "Contributors" section in the header instead.

This is the style GeoTools and GeoServer use resulting in a header like the following:

 * Copyright (c) 2012 Eclipse Foundation and others.

 * Copyright © 2004-2012 Refractions Research

Aside: I can find a few examples of this in the BIRT documentation referencing the original "Actuate" project; since these are in screen snaps they may of just escaped the review process - or perhaps it is a valid option to credit previous contributors.

If I am not mistaken until today no step forward has been done on this side, so I am just wondering why we are moving on? Are things happening behind the scenes?

Nope. While I would like to talk to Refractions to keep them in the loop -

1) The project is open source (under an LGPL license). The resulting "new" project would using the source code as a cut-and-paste starting point and be available under the Eclipse Foundation under an EPL license.

2) We are running the project as PMC and need to take the long term health of uDig into account. We have looked into joining the Eclipse Foundation for a number of years - and now with the formation of the location working group the timing seems to be advantageous.

So while Refractions is not a sticking point; the more interesting (and possibly untraceable) problem is that of our use of LGPL libraries (JTS and GeoTools). As such we need to negotiate an exception as part of our eclipse incubation process.

I hope the difference between license, copyright and simple Canadian polietness clear in the above email.

We would like to talk to Refractions to be polite - but if they don't return our call so be it (I have not been motivated enough to match their business hours and call long distance - but I can if you like). Ideally I wanted to set up a conference call with Andrew as he know more of this stuff then me.

Jody