[TOS] Conference Call - Monday Sept 14 - 15:00 UTC

[Ross Gardler]

As usual I will be unable to attend the call. However I would
appreciate it if the legal situation for the book is discussed. Until
these are resolved I (and possibly others) are unable to contribute.
We have agreed, as a community, what the licensing model is to be but
we have not put any structure into place to ensure that we can
accommodate that.

Summary of issues:

a) licence on FLOSSManuals does not reflect licence agreed by
community (and is a licence not recommended for text by its own
authors http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals)

b) copyright is being accredited to an individual (not enforceable in
many parts of the EU)

c) copyright is (to all intents and purposes) assigned to the chapter
author rather than licenced by contributor as agreed here

This is a ***blocker*** for me as a contributor. We have something
like 50+ QAd articles ***already written*** and another 30+ written
but not QAd. These resources span the majority of the proposed
chapters and include supporting interviews and case studies. We
publish around 15 new articles every year. I have scheduled half a day
every week of our content editor (who is a professional content editor
with 20 years experience) to work on integrating our work into the the
book/

The book would be considerably further advanced if we were to resolve
these issues.

For my part I don't care who owns the copyright in the collective
works, but I need to be able to show our lawyers that the work is
adequately protected under British law, that is I need to show that I
have only licenced our contributions to the book and thus I can
continue to use our work in any way I desire.

Having it licenced by to us is not sufficient for our legal team. We
need to retain copyright in our own materials and we need that to be
represented in the legal documentation. This means we need contributor
licence agreements as does any such project.

I have volunteered to manage this process on behalf of the community,
but we need to get the process in place before it can be managed. As
soon as we agree who the copyright will be assigned to I will have the
CLA drawn up. Those who don't care and are happy to assign copyright
to the copyright holder can just proceed - the rest of us will need to
submit a CLA. I will handle the paperwork and, if necessary, I will
provide the University of Oxford as the owner of the copyright - there
will be no further paperwork required in this case as OSS Watch
already has the necessary infrastructure set up.

Please note, this is not a "will write" but a "have written", situation.

Ross


2009/9/14 Chris Tyler <chris at tylers.info>:
>
> Just a reminder that there's a TOS conference call Monday (Sept 14) at
> 15:00 UTC (11:00 EDT). We need to discuss (and invest some energy in)
> some of our initiatives to make them succeed.
>
> Call info including codes is at:
> http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/TOS_Conference_Call
>
> Proposed agenda is at:
> http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/TOS_Conference_Call/2009-09-14/Agenda
>
> -Chris
>
> _______________________________________________
> tos mailing list
> tos at teachingopensource.org
> http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
>



-- 
Ross Gardler

OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk