Discussion about licence change, Contributor Licence Agreement, and PSC
This is a survey for important decisions we would like to make in a near future for OTB. Feel free to post your comments on this wiki page! The deadline for filling the discussion sections is the 6th of february 2015.
Contents
Changing licence to Apache v2.0
What we would like to do
For quite some time now we have been considering a change of licence for OTB, to adopt the Apache v2.0 licence. The rational for this change is as follows :
Copyleft is a very good protection for open-source software in general, since it ensures that it will remain open, but in our remote sensing world it can also lesser the dissemination of our software. Many time we heard of situations were OTB was considered by institutions or private companies for their projects and has been wiped off the table because they (or their clients or partners) wanted to distribute the resulting software under different terms. Sometimes, costly ad-hoc technical designs are used so as to include OTB in the project while distributing it under those required terms. We could argue that this is a matter of convincing everyone that copyleft is not harmful and that OTB is worth the price, but in the mean time OTB get less audience than deserved ... From a practical point of view it could do no harm to simply change the licence to a more permissive one. This might help to develop OTB usage and eventually get more people involved in contributions.
Setting up a proper Contributor Licence Agreement
What we would like to do
Why ? Because we see and welcome more and more contributions from our users. Without any other agreement, those contributions are implicitly made with the same licence (i.e. CeCILL v2) while copyright is retained by the contributor. With an increasing number of contributions, the project might become a ship impossible to stir, for instance in the event of a necessary change of licence to an up-to-date one (yes licences have bugs too !), we would require to ask the permission of every contributor (for now still possible ... but it might turn impossible if one of them simply vanishes). What does the CLA state ? There are actually two options : asking for a copyright transfert, in which case the project owner will own all copyright and thus will be able to take future actions for it, or asking for the appropriate authorizations to take those actions while retaining copyright for the contributor. We prefer the second option, because there is no reason why anyone contributing should give away her copyright. What we would like to ask is for the right to relicence the whole software (including contributions) into an equivalent or more permissive licence (this will guarantee that the code remains OSS), if the PSC of the projects decides to. A CLA of course requires paperwork and signature (and in case of corporate contributions, the company should sign it too), but again it is worth the price, as it will also convince potential users that the software is free of copyright infringements. Here are the individual and company CLA of ASF for instance. We would like to apply it to any significant contribution (i.e. not for typos or very small patches).
Discussion
Please write your comments here.
Setting up a Project Steering Committee
What we would like to do
Until now, the project has been informally stirred by people at CNES (Manuel, me, and Jordi or Emmanuel before us). Of course, we are always disccusing technical details and orientations with the dev team at CS as well as with the otb-developers list, but with the increasing interest and contributors, we think it is time to set-up an official steering comittee, with publicly identified people, rules and decisions. We would like this steering comittee to be open to any participant, and new members would be accepted by existing ones following those public rules.
Discussion
Please write your comments here.
