Copyright Headers in Source Code Files

OSGeo has now received legal advice on copyright headers in source code files. This advice is summarised here for the benefit of all projects:

• Copyright headers in source code files are not required to enforce copyright.
• Works still under copyright when the Berne Convention was adopted (1992 in the United States) are protected under this convention.
• Works created after the Berne Convention was adopted are also protected.
• There is no need to include a copyright header for a source code file created or modified after the Berne Convention was adopted. A modified source code file is a new work.
• Source code files created before the adoption of the Berne Convention and not modified since its adoption should include a copyright header with the dates of creation and modification. These dates support the assertion that these files are covered by the Berne Convention.
• A header that names the project, links to the project page, and references the licence is informative, and while not legally binding, might deter some infringers (at least they were warned file-by-file that the code is open source).
• Both individual source code files and the project source as a whole are copyrighted works.

GeoTools was first published in 1996. Project policy requires a copyright header in source code files; these should be seen as informative, and are not required to enforce copyright. See GeoTools Header Policy Updated for details. 

Note that the authors of this blog post are not lawyers and this post has not been reviewed by a lawyer. This post should not be construed as legal advice.

CodeHaus Migration Schedule

As per earlier blog post CodeHaus is shutting down and the GeoTools project is taking steps to migrate our issue tracker and wiki to a new home.

First up I need to thank the Open Source Geospatial Foundation for responding quickly in a productive fashion. The board and Alex Mandel were in position to respond quickly and hire a contractor to work with the system admin committee to capture this content while it is still available.

I should also thank Boundless for providing me time coordinate CodeHaus migration and Andrea for arranging cloud hosting.

Updates:

• Update April 7th: GeoAPI project attachments migrated (using this to estimate time remaining)
• Update April 3rd: Issue tracker signup open to all (no need to email project leads).
• Update April 2nd: Mauro Bartolomeo created GEOT-5074 in the new issue tracker
• Update March 28th: Placeholder tickets created, contents and attachments to follow

Confluence Migration

Is scheduled for ... March 26th! I have taken a copy of the CodeHaus wiki and will be migrating proposals and project history. A html dump of the wiki is published at old.geotools.org so we have a record.

The new wiki is available here: https://github.com/geotools/geotools/wiki

GitHub Wiki

Jira Migration

Jira migration will start on 00:00 UTC Saturday March 28th.

On Saturday all issues will start migrating to their new home (and CodeHaus issue creation will be disabled). If you wish to lend a hand testing please drop by the #osgeo IRC channel on Saturday. Harrison Grundy will be coordinating the proceedings.

We have set up a new JIRA available at osgeo-org.atlassian.net for the migration. You can sign up directly (although we ask you to consider keeping the same user name).

OSGeo Jira

As shown above a few friendly CodeHaus refugees have also been sheltered for the storm (uDig and GeoAPI).

Annual Report 2012

Key Accomplishments

• The project has switched from subversion to git and is now hosted at GitHub
• GeoTools 8.0 was released
  
  • First major release after a 1.5 year drought
  • Amazing release with Java 6, join support, temporal filters, detailed function descriptions
• A total of 10 GeoTools releases made over the course of the year
• The project has switched to a predictable time-boxed release model featuring: six month release cycle and stable release issued each month.
  
  • Extensive build infrastructure improvements with automated release scripts to help us meet this aggressive goal
• Extensive FeatureCollection cleanup and Quality Assurance run slated to land for the next major release

Areas for Improvement 

• Attract participation from downstream projects
• Coordinate with downstream projects around release testing
• Contribution License questions have provided some confusion this year

Opportunities to Help

• Volunteers needed to review pull-requests
• The transition to GitHub has certainty paid off, join the team and help us keep up!

Outlook for 2013

• Enjoying active success, and your participation

New OSGeo Contributor License

The GeoTools PSC is pleased to announce a new contribution license for the project. The contribution license is signed by authors in order to license their work to the OSGeo Foundation for distribution by the GeoTools project.

There are actually two licenses (one for individuals and one for corporate contributors) which are available in our developers guide or directly from the OSGeo Foundation licenses page:

• The Open Source Geospatial Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement 
• The Open Source Geospatial Foundation Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License Agreement

This license arrangement is much easier to understand, and is based directly on the Apache Contributor License. This last point is important as it is much easier for your legal department to research and sign off on.

These licenses were approved at a recent board meeting and are the result of our request for change procedure (see Replace Contribution Agreement RFC).

GeoTools Mini Conference at OSDC Canberra

GeoTools has lined up an exciting "Mini Conference" slot at this years Open Source Developers Conference in Canberra Nov 14th (at Australian National University in the Manning Clark Center).

You can attend just the GeoTools session for $50 - but we recommend staying for the whole open source conference. There is also the Spatial@Gov conference running concurrently if you would like to focus on maps for the rest of the week.

The half day session is brought to you by two Australia GeoTools leaders: Tisham Dhar and Jody Garnett.
For details:

• GeoTools Tutorial (Mini Conference)

Would you like to run a GeoTools tutorial in your area? Join us on geotools-devel to discuss running a course (and translation opportunities). The course is an excellent introduction to both open source and geospatial conferences.
Thank you to the Aust-NZ OSGeo chapter for setting up this opportunity.