fenics team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Ham skrev 2010-10-20 20.20:
> On 20/10/10 19:10, Anders Logg wrote:
> > David Ham skrev 2010-10-20 19.54:
> > > > > How should we go about making the change? Is it enough if everyone
> > > > > just
> > > > > responds to this list? Or do we need something more formal like David
> > > > > Ham suggests?
> > > >
> > > > Can you reiterate what he suggested.
> > >
> > > I can reiterate what he suggested ;).
> > >
> > > In essence, if you write code as part of your job, your employer owns
> > > the copyright, not you. The Fluidity project handles this by requiring a
> > > copyright licensing letter from every individual contributor and from
> > > the copyright department at their institution. The Institution letter
> > > says:
> > >
> > > CONSENT TO COPYRIGHT LICENSING UNDER THE LGPL
> > >
> > > On behalf of name of<commercialisation organisation> I hereby give my
> > > consent to the redistribution and/or modification of<name of
> > > university> contributions to the Fluidity/Imperial College Ocean Model
> > > project under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
> > > published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the
> > > License, or (at each distributor's option) any later version.
> > >
> > > The individual letters say essentially the same thing with the obvious
> > > changes.
> > >
> > > To be really safe in terms of knowing that you absolutely, legally do
> > > have the right to distribute under a given licence, I think you need to
> > > do something like that. However you might also take the position that as
> > > long as the individual contributors are happy, the universities will be
> > > too. Imperial is very mercenary so I wouldn't take that for granted but
> > > your institutions might be more enlightened.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> >
> > I think that would work fine. The main trouble would be to hunt down
> > everyone that has ever contributed and make them sign the paper, but the
> > sooner we try the greater chance we have of a success.
> >
> > I suggest we try this. I can put together a form and put it somewhere on
> > the website for download. Then everyone will be asked to get it signed
> > and return it to me. (Anyone else wants to collect the documents, let me
> > know.) Johannes can assist me in keeping track of which signatures are
> > missing. When we have a large enough fraction of signatures (so we think
> > we can safely ignore the missing signatures), then we can update all the
> > licenses.
>
> If it's useful, the full documentation for how we do this is at:
>
> http://amcg-www.ese.ic.ac.uk/index.php?title=Local:Copyright_Clearance_Procedures
>
>
> Our copyright log is at:
>
> http://amcg-www.ese.ic.ac.uk/index.php?title=Local:Copyright_holders
>
> which also contains scanned copies of all the institutional letters (we
> don't scan individual letters).
>
> Feel free to copy anything which is useful.
>
> The thing to remember with getting institutional letters is that there
> is generally some IP or commercialisation office at the university who
> are the only people in the institution allowed to sign copyright
> licenses for university IP. Individual PIs or department heads usually
> don't have this power. For example at Imperial we have to go through
> Imperial Innovations for this.
>
> Regards,

Thanks, I'll look at that and try to modify it to suit our needs.

--
Anders