Well it was brought to my attention that there are some legal issues of concerne between OSGEO and GRASS. Lets see if we can hash some of these out
Scott Mitchell comented
I too had concerns about the copyright transfer issues early on, but this seems to have been taken care of.
Offline coment (no permission for name was obtained so I’ll keep it anonymous)
Potential legal issues top my list of concerns.
Source: http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_Project_Steering_Commitee
One benefit of the foundation is some degree of legal
support and protection for the project. The flip side of that
is that the foundation needs to ensure some degree of
rigor and process in how code comes into the project. One
part of that is getting committers to sign a legal agreement
indicating that they agree that changes they commit will
be under the license of GRASS (GPL) and that they have
the right to submit the code (they wrote it, it is not
patented, have permission from their employer, etc).
…
o We will have to review the existing code base (which is
huge - more than 500000 lines of source code in GRASS 6).
Luckily a major code review was already done for GRASS 5.
Also the “Debianization” process was performed for GRASS
5 and GRASS 6.
So what other legal issues need clearing up here? What are these other issues?