[Coin-discuss] New foundation legal policies released for comment

[Hart, William E]

Ted:

My first impression is that this change is a very good idea.  This makes COIN more consistent with other open-source initiatives.  Additionally, it is clear that different legal requirements will arise for different commercial end-users.  Thus, seems unwise to be too make legal requirements a bottleneck for including new projects in COIN-OR.

I'm going to get feedback on this from Sandia's lawyers.  However, there are some aspects of this that puzzled me.  For example, suppose I write a contract to generate some code that will be included in an open source software project, where the contract language indicates that this IP will be licensed by Sandia in through an open source license.  Now, if I then contribute this code to COIN-OR, it is not clear to me what documentation a third-party user would need to see to verify the nature of the contribution for the contractor.  The contract itself?  Some statement from the contractor's contracts organization?  However, I can think that Sandia releasing would claim in this case that it can assert copyright on this software.  Would that be enough?  I don't know.  I suspect that this will evolve end-user requirements become clearer.

--Bill


-----Original Message-----
From: coin-discuss-bounces at list.coin-or.org [mailto:coin-discuss-bounces at list.coin-or.org] On Behalf Of Ted Ralphs
Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2009 7:42 AM
To: Discussions about open source software for Operations Research; coin-announce at list.coin-or.org
Subject: [Coin-discuss] New foundation legal policies released for comment

The COIN-OR Foundation's Strategic Leadership Board is pleased to
announce the release of new document outlining a proposed change in
legal policy. This document is now available for public comment here:

http://www.coin-or.org/legal.html

The new policy is aimed at streamlining project acceptance procedures
and ensuring the repository remains as open as possible while
maintaining respect for intellectual property laws and transparency
with regard to the legal pedigree of hosted codes. We would appreciate
any feedback we can get from the user community regarding how this
change in policy might affect your ability to use or contribute to the
growing collection of software in COIN. I hope to see many of you in
San Diego!

Cheers,

Ted Ralphs
Chair, Legal Affairs Committee
Associate Professor, Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted

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