Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 21:27 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
In reply to: Contractual obligations? by rfontana
Parent article: Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Apache project developers retain their copyrights and do not assign them to the project. The project, however, doesn't attribute the developers in the code, but in a separate file. So it's impossible to tell who owns what without going through SVN checkins. And it's unsure even then.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 3:03 UTC (Wed) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (5 responses)

That's pretty much FUD. Apache has great IP provenance.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 20, 2015 3:26 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (4 responses)

Not FUD at all. Read any source code file from the foundation, the provenance isn't there.

When I complained about Apache's poor IP provenance to Larry Rosen, who was the general counsel of the Apache foundation at the time, he simply didn't believe that maintaining the provenance of individual authors with the portion of the code that they contributed was important. What has changed since then?

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 20, 2015 12:59 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

The provenance is in the record keeping of grants, iCLAs and the SVN logs. It's pretty in-depth and the model for how many, many other FOSS projects handle IP provenance.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 20, 2015 13:23 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (2 responses)

Larry Rosen was never General Counsel of the ASF. And despite Larry's opinion (many of which I respect), we have numerous legal opinions to the contrary.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 25, 2015 9:07 UTC (Tue) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link] (1 responses)

He was a member of the Board of Directors for some time in 2011 and resigned the same year. Perhaps that was what Bruce Perens refers to.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 25, 2015 17:06 UTC (Tue) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

Possibly... he did say General Counsel though, which is quite different from Director. But it may have been a typo.