Subject: [Fenics] Licenses

From: Anders Logg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:15:33 +0200

Dear all,

Johannes has gone through all source code to examine which licenses we 
are using. The current situation is that we use a mix of GPL and LPGL 
versions 2.1, 2.1+, 3, and 3+. See attached summary.

My suggestion is that we simply move everything over to LGPL 3+, that 
is, LGPL v3 or any later version. I think everyone has said this is ok 
so it's just a practical problem to make the change.

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?

--
Anders

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:06:32 +0200

> so it's just a practical problem to make the change.

Good plan.

> _______________________________________________
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~fenics
> Post to     : [email-masked]
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~fenics
> More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
>

---

From: Johan Hake <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:46:46 -0700

> so it's just a practical problem to make the change.

I think so too.

> responds to this list? Or do we need something more formal like David

Can you reiterate what he suggested. 

Johan

---

From: David Ham <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:54:22 +0100

> 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,

David

-- 
Dr David Ham
Applied Modelling and Computation Group,
Department of Earth Science and Engineering,
Imperial College London,

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/david.ham

---

From: Anders Logg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:10:41 +0200

> your institutions might be more enlightened.

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.

Sounds good?

--
Anders

---

From: Marie Rognes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:11:36 +0200

On 20. okt. 2010 20:10, Anders Logg wrote:
> 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.
>
> Sounds good?
>

Yes.

--
Marie

---

From: David Ham <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:20:54 +0100

On 20/10/10 19:10, Anders Logg wrote:
>> On behalf of name of<commercialisation organisation>  I hereby give my
>> consent to the redistribution and/or modification of<name of

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,

David

---

From: Anders Logg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:26:13 +0200

> Imperial Innovations for this.

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

-- 
Anders