OSGeo Community project application: Clear contribution policy

[Jody Garnett]

Jody here from the incubation list, going to try and manage communication in your issue tracker as we keep dropping things in email.

One of the requirements is that we ask projects to have a “clear contribution policy”.

I could not locate this information when looking in your repository or developers docs?!

[Jody Garnett]

The _gitWorkflow.md __file _tindicates some boundaries about external-developers and commit rights, but not about permission or providence of code being offered as a pull-request.

Here is the OpenLayers https://github.com/openlayers/openlayers/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md. This is an example where the file says that the code being provided in the PR will be used under the same license as the project. If this is your intention, you want folks contributing code to give you permission to use the MIT license on what they uploaded in the PR.

As an example here is the GeoTools https://github.com/geotools/geotools/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md file. This one requires folks to sign a contributing license agreement providing the team with more rights to remix code then are obtained with the project LGPL license. This has been used by the team to donate code to the JTS project for example.

This is a question for your team / leadership to decide. What are your expectations for code or docs that are provided to you via a PR?

[Friedrich Müller]

@Jody Garnett Thank you very much for the hints.

We added a Contributor License Agreement for contributions to our MIT license:

https://bitbucket.org/geowerkstatt-hamburg/masterportal/pull-requests/4579

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Is this what you asked for?

Best regards,

[Jody Garnett]

Close! I was asking that it be clear to potential contributors what is required. In this case you are accepting the code from a person using the MIT License;

#### Contributor License Agreement

* Your contribution will be under [MIT License](https://bitbucket.org/geowerkstatt-hamburg/masterportal/raw/5e7faf83734509a15438805790d3b434428b35fc/License.txt)

So if I was to make a contribution to your project the file would look like:

Copyright 2023 Jody Garnett

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
…

Because if I am making a new file as an individual “Jody Garnett” is the copyright holder.

Q: Is that what you intended?

For more information: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8616/how-to-note-contributors-work-with-mit-license

recommendation:

Contribution

Thank you for taking part in our project! Our project uses a MIT License which depends on copyright to be effective. Please add appropriate information to the header when making a contribution, either yourself as an individual, or your employer if working as an employee. This also means we cannot accept code that was created with the assistance of AI (as copyright cannot be established).

Example from

/*!
 * Bootstrap v5.1.3 (https://getbootstrap.com/)
 * Copyright 2011-2021 The Bootstrap Authors
 * Copyright 2011-2021 Twitter, Inc.
 * Copyright YEAR YOUR_NAME_OR_EMPLOYER_HERE
 * Licensed under MIT (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/LICENSE)
 * Adapted to Masterportal Requirements (https://www.hamburg.de/geowerkstatt)
 */

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Contribution License is not an Open-source license

A “Contribution License” is a specific situation with an open-source project where the relationship between the development team, and the contributor is not equal.

In GeoServer we have this situation:

a) we release code to the public using GPL License (this is about publishing)

b) we accept code using an OSGeo Contributor License; which grants the GeoServer team more permissions then GPL does. Indeed it gives us permission to donate code (that someone else has written) to other projects at our discretion. That is a big extension of trust we are asking! We have used this ability to donate code from GeoServer (GPL) to GeoTools (LGPL) - this is something we would not of been able to do if the code was only provided to us with a GPL license.

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