[foundation-board] CKAN licence?

Fri Aug 26 17:00:52 UTC 2011

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Jordan S Hatcher
<jordan at opencontentlawyer.com> wrote:
>
> On 25 Aug 2011, at 11:28, Ben Laurie wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Becky Hogge <becky.hogge at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 25 August 2011 10:46, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
>>>>> On 24 August 2011 15:55, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:04 PM, James Casbon <casbon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> In any case, though, is this not a matter for the whole board?
>>>
>>> Or perhaps wider - the Board aspire to limit itself to matters of
>>> legal and financial compliance, and to conduct discussions about
>>> strategy in a way which meaningfully includes the wider community.
>>
>> Whilst I broadly agree with this goal, licensing discussions are hard
>> to have with a wide community because you very quickly rathole into
>> the GPL vs BSD wars, which seem unresolvable to me (it seems patently
>> obvious to me that BSD style licences, amongst which I count the
>> Apache Licence, are more open than GPL style licences - but apparently
>> the opposite is patently obvious to others). In licensing it seems
>> there's a need for some amount of benevolent dictatorship. Or at least
>> a benevolent oligarchy.
>>
>> Another interesting question is: what is the wider community? Allowing
>> a free-for-all, as the IETF does, means that people with time on their
>> hands get to strongly influence the discussion, even when they have no
>> stake whatsoever in the outcome. It seems to me that community should
>> be limited to active participants. However, participation is somewhat
>> governed by licensing - you won't find GPL zealots working on Apache
>> projects, and vice versa. So asking a community who have chosen to
>> contribute to a GPL-based effort whether it should be GPL-licensed is
>> likely to be a foregone conclusion.
>>
>> In any case, this discussion is important to me, whatever the forum,
>> and I am not in favour of delaying it.
>
> We may be limited in license choice because AFAIK we do not use contributors agreements for contributions that would allow us to migrate to a new license.  That means that OKF is just another licensee and not the copyright licensor with the ability to chose another license.

This seems like a problem that needs fixing...

> That doesn't mean we are without options, as we could do a wikipedia style fait accompli transition or an openstreetmap style sign up process to do a transition to a new license.  That's a Big Deal® and not one to be taken lightly.
>
> We definitely could do better in how we run our software projects on the licensing side of things.  I see this as an offshoot of the fact that we are focussed on open knowledge broadly, and though many of our projects involve coding, I don't think we really run things with the mental perspective of a software focussed organisation (such as ASF).

Another way in which that is apparent is that it is remarkably hard to
find OKF software!

> I think that this is definitely one of the great things about having you on the board Ben, and any suggestions on how to improve or further thoughts you have would be great.  You've brought up two so far -- a potential need of contributor agreements and what our default license choice should be for code.

I know that there is interest in how we can move the OKF to being more
community-governed. Broadly following the ASF model seems to be the
obvious choice, but there's an impedance mismatch: in the ASF there is
a clear ladder of advancement in influence:

a) Member of the public: can join lists, make comments and offer
contributions which have to be committed by a...

b) Committer: has write access to one or more repos. Elected by the
PMC of the relevant project(s). Must sign a CLA.

c) PMC (Project Management Committee): the ASF advocates that the PMC
should simply be the set of all committers for the project, but this
is not always so. Can elect new committers, broadly responsible for
project direction.

d) Member: can elect new members, and elects the board. Agrees to the
principles of the Foundation.

e) Board: does what the board does.

The impedance mismatch, it seems to me, is around what a committer is
in the OKF. The rest would seem to fit quite naturally.

I'd note that there are ASF members who have arrived by other routes,
e.g. Sally Khudairi who was elected after much service in PR and
conferences.