[OpenLayers-Dev] improvements in the OpenLayers project's licenses

[John R. Frank]

Dear OpenLayers Community,

We intend to make these changes in a few days.  If you have any questions
or comments, please direct them to users at openlayers.org

Over the past few months, the OpenLayers PSC has discussed a couple issues
in project licensing.  One issue that motivated this is an inconsistency
in the way we were treating sandboxes.  We intend for sandboxes to be easy
places for people to drop code before it has been groomed for
distribution, which could be before a CLA has been signed.  Currently, the
repository-license.txt implies that a CLA has been signed.  In fact,
currently, the sandboxes are *un*licensed.  The changes below fix this and
improve the overall repository licensing setup.  One of the foss4g
discussion topics can be how to make sandboxes licensable -- CRS is
carrying this on his list of things to discuss.


The PSC has voted to adopt the following specific improvements, which
serve to clarify ownership and move OpenLayers closer to OSGEO graduation.


1) Reorganize the directories and license files in SVN as follows:

/sandbox/
/trunk/
/branches/
/project/website/         * moved from /trunk
/tags/
/sandbox-license.txt      * see below
/repository-license.txt   * also copied into /trunk/openlayers/.
/release-license.txt

2) The current repository-license.txt has a preamble sentence that says
that it covers the sandboxes.  This is not the intent.  The attached
sandbox-license.txt says what we intend.

3) The current repository-license.txt explicitly references MetaCarta.
We intend to replace it with the Clear BSD [1], which is better.  In
addition to replacing the old repository-license with the Clear BSD, we
intend to change the first sentence to say "This license applies to all
code and content in the 'branches', 'trunk', and 'project' directories of
the Openlayers code repository at svn.openlayers.org"

4) As described on the page about the Clear BSD [1], the current CLAs are
not as explicit about patent rights as one might like, so we intend to
replace the current CLAs with those.  In case you're curious, MetaCarta is
now using the Clear BSD and these CLAs on FeatureServer and TileCache.

5) Similarly, we intend to change the release-license.txt sentence to say
"This license applies to official code releases of the OpenLayers project,
which are stored in svn.openlayers.org/tags/ and provided in archive form
from www.openlayers.org"


We intend to make these changes in a few days.  If you have any questions
or comments, please direct them to users at openlayers.org

Yours,
John Frank on behalf of the OpenLayers PSC


[1]  http://labs.metacarta.com/license-explanation.html
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