2009-05-08 Licensing Requirements Discussion

(616) 347-8000,   access code:  992610#

Jonathan, Cris, Susan, John Lewis

Current exit criteria:

These requirements are dependent on approval of a Jasig licensing policy.

1. All code properly licensed.
2. No non-licensed or license-incompatible dependencies in the code base.
3. Software license grant complete.
4. Contributor License Agreements on file (both individual and corporate agreement).
5. Copyright agreement in all source files.
6. Check of project name for trademark issues.  Jasig will assist in trademark registration for project name.

Pending the Jasig licensing policy, the IWG will accept projects with similar licensing status to existing projects.

Individual files should not contain copyrights.  Don't have to be removed but do need to have them in the notices file.  We are not asking anyone to assign copyrights.  We ARE asking them to sign grant agreement or contributor license agreement to grant Jasig broad spectrum of rights by either

• one time grant agreement or
• contributor agreements 

Asking them to remove and move copyrights to notices document.

For example new code in sandbox need contributor agreement from each  committer going forward.

John will finish revisions and incubation can refer to it.

Example Bedework

1. revise code itself with standard headers and notices file.
2. 3rd party content handled according to policy
3. get future committers to sign Jasig contributor agreements (either corporate or individual)
4. Software license grant from one or more entities (RPI, UWash or more) - How do we figure out who needs to make the grant.  Major contributor would need to determine if they believe they can sign.  If they hold the copyright then must assign rights.  (John will clarify whether must own copyright to grant it.)   They can probably relicense.

Could say that all contributions in past are covered too.

Ideally anyone with a copyright in the contribution would sign an agreement of some kind.  Otherwise do the uPortal manoever which is to say that the original contribution was so liberal that they are all able to be relicensed.

We DO want to have either one of 3 new agreements signed OR the new BSD license.  Any other requires that we observe other license terms.

Incubation group will default to rejecting a project if one of the above is not in force.

IWG needs to gather info on all the schools that need to sign one of 3 agreements.

All new Jasig projects will be licensed under Apache 2.0 license agreement unless an exception is made.  Exceptions may be too much of a burden.  Jasig wants to be able to ensure intellectual rights in the future so will be unlikely to be able to accept other licenses.

Should IWG encourage refactoring code into org.jasig packages rather than edu.yale or other?  Yes if feasable - not necessarily required.  Don't want to imply license or ownership through packages.

John will finalize drafts and eventually move to own wiki space instead of board space.