[Ctk-developers] COPYRIGHT & LICENSING

[Tarbox, Lawrence]

The Apache license is fine with me.  It is what I would have recommended.

As to copyright, certainly one should be in place in the source code.  But if the Apache license notice is in place, it should not matter much who holds the copyright, since the Apache license grants anyone the right to do what we are doing.

Certain software that might be contributed might already have a copyright and might already be distributed under alternate license terms.  As long as the license terms are compatible with Apache, I would not think that there is a need to change the original copyright or license terms.

Compatible, for us, implies that we are allowed to redistribute a combined package as a new work with its own licensing terms (e.g. Apache), as long as the licensing terms of the contributed bits can still be fulfilled (e.g. attribution).

At least that is my humble opinion.  However, I am not a lawyer, hence my opinion has no standing in a court of law.



-----Original Message-----
From: ctk-developers-bounces at commontk.org [mailto:ctk-developers-bounces at commontk.org] On Behalf Of Luis Ibanez
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 09:37 AM
To: ctk-developers
Subject: [Ctk-developers] COPYRIGHT & LICENSING

Yes,
it is not the most amusing conversation to have,
but it is better to do this early...


   1) Most files in CTK are lacking Copyright
       notices and an explicit License.

   2) There is not LICENCE file at the top of
       the source tree.



I propose that we assign the copyright of the source code
to the Insight Software Consortium (ISC), and that we
distribute the code under an Apache 2.0 License.

  http://www.opensource.org/licenses/apache2.0.php



The ISC is the organization that holds the copyright of

          *  ITK
          *  CMake (along with Kitware)
          * IGSTK


More information about the ISC at:

    http://www.insightsoftwareconsortium.org/


It will also be important for your respective organizations
to join the ISC, or for you to join as individuals, so you
help ensure that the CTK project is managed as you
intended.


Every day that passes without having a clear License
and Copyright statement is a day were we are brewing
a recipe for disaster.



If someone needs to be persuaded, we can provide details
on the horror story of how much trouble we are having in ITK
with source code of dubious origin (no copyright notice nor
license) that we adopted from   www.netlib.org....



      Luis
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