[Ctk-developers] COPYRIGHT & LICENSING

Mon Apr 12 14:23:42 UTC 2010

I agree with Bill,

The choice of a good License is more important that who holds the
Copyright (and patents, and trademarks) associated with the code.

In practice, tracing the Copyright holders of code in an Open Source
project is an impossible task.

Whoever is contributing code to an Open Source project with the
intention of conserving ownership or control over such code has
flawed understanding of how software development works in a
peer-production environment.

Files tend to (and *should*) be modified by many different developers,
who are affiliated to different institutions. Every institution will hold
the
copyright of every modification.

You may know "who" is the copyright holder of a file, the first day that
file
is committed. But after ten years of this file being modified and retouched
by twenty other developers from ten other institutions, you have a file
where

55% of the lines are copyrighted by institution A
27% by institution B
13% by institution C..
... and so on.

In a well-managed open source project, such modifications of any given
file by many different developers *is expected* to happen.

When a file has only been touched by a single developer, that's an
indication
that nobody else in the project cares about such file, and that the project
has
poor practices of code review and suffers from lack of participation.

So, even if any given organization want to conserve "ownership" of the
code, that is simply unrealistic in practice.

Assigning copyright of the code to a non-for-profit organization is actually
a way of protecting the developers (and their institutions).

This is discussed in great detail in:

 "Intellectual Property and Open Source
  A Practical Guide to Protecting Code"
  by Van Lindberg
 http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960

In any case, what is more important is to chose a License, that make
irrelevant
(and unnecessary) to track ownership of the source code. The MIT, BSD and
Apache 2.0 licenses are typical good choices that satisfy such condition.

The Apache 2.0 license is particularly attractive in this case because it is
the only one from this group, that includes specific clauses about code
contributions.

         Luis

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com>wrote:

> I agree with that license is more important that the copyright holders.
>
> In VTK, many files have multiple copyrights, but all share the same
> license.
>
> Bill
>
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Ron Kikinis <kikinis at bwh.harvard.edu>
> wrote:
> > Luis,
> >
> > The apache license sounds reasonable to me. In terms of making ISC the
> owner
> > of the copyright:
> > As you know, we have taken a different approach with Slicer in that the
> > contributors keep the copyright and only grant an irrevocable and
> unlimited
> > license for use in Slicer (I am not a lawyer so this is not legal
> language).
> >
> > On an other point: ISC was created to hold the copyright for ITK. The
> > website does not really reflect the more recent additions of cmake and
> > IGSTK. The board of directors primarily reflects ITK and would probably
> > require some updates.
> >
> > One question: how "dictator proof" is ISC?
> >
> > Ron
> >
> >
> >
> > On 4/9/10 10:36 AM, Luis Ibanez wrote:
> >>
> >> 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
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Ctk-developers mailing list
> >> Ctk-developers at commontk.org
> >> http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ctk-developers
> >
> > --
> > Ron Kikinis, M.D.,
> > Robert Greenes Distinguished Director of Biomedical Informatics
> > Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School
> > Director, Surgical Planning Laboratory
> > http://www.spl.harvard.edu/~kikinis<http://www.spl.harvard.edu/%7Ekikinis>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ctk-developers mailing list
> > Ctk-developers at commontk.org
> > http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ctk-developers
> >
> _______________________________________________
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>
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