Ok, so I've been working on this for many months, and have finally gotten it together. Thanks to everyone who gave me early feedback, I hope this version is acceptable to all. Note that it's still a GSIP, so we can still modify it, nothing is set in stone.
The proposal contains a contributor agreement and supporting documentation about motivations for doing it, ect. My hope is that we clean up the legal provenance. This also gives us the flexibility to change licenses in the future.
It gives copyright assignment to one organization, The Open Planning Project, the 501c3 non-profit I work for and that started GeoServer. This is done to provide better protection, and to make it easier to change licenses. All power to change license, however, is given to the GeoServer Project Steering Committee. Right now there is no proposal to change licenses, but there will likely be a GSIP digging in to specifics of 'community licensing', which will allow us to issue non-GPL licenses for a fee that goes back to the community. This proposal has some explanation about that, since doing contributor agreements does beg the question about such things.
If you are interested, please read the proposal and all the supporting documents.
The proposal is available at: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/GSIP+15+-+Contributor+Agreements+and+Supporting+Documentation
We are very interested in hearing everyone's feedback, both those intimately involved and new users. Licensing and community can be tricky stuff, and we're trying to figure out the best way to sustainably grow the community. Our biggest concern does always remain keeping everyone in the current community happy, and then looking outward to see how we can grow things even more. If you have any insight or advice for us, please let us know. Feel free to reply publicly to this thread, or in private to me or other members of the PSC.
best regards,
Chris
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Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
http://topp.openplans.org