[SciPy-Dev] License / Copyright Stuff

[Tyler Reddy]

Thanks--a few minutes after posting this another scipy developer who works
here (Nathan Woods) called me with another approach (!), so there might be
a better solution I can look into.

On 24 March 2017 at 11:18, Stephan Hoyer <shoyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> The SciPy license says that it is "Copyright (c) 2003-2016 SciPy
> Developers", but you'd have to look in the git logs to figure out who those
> "SciPy Developers" are. That's good enough for some employers. For example,
> Google owns my recent contributions to NumPy but did not insist on adding a
> "Copyright Google" line to NumPy's license.
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 9:48 AM, Anne Archibald <peridot.faceted at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> Not a lawyer, but currently the AUTHORS file indicates who owns the
>> copyrights to scipy code. Perhaps a note on your line in the AUTHORS file
>> to indicate that your contributions (on some dates) are owned by Los
>> Alamos?
>>
>> I would note in passing that many scipy contributors (including me)
>> probably have or had similar constraints but are lucky enough that their
>> employers don't care (or don't know). Many universities have rules about
>> who owns intellectual property that can be surprising to their employees.
>>
>> For many open source projects, there are enough contributors already that
>> contacting everyone who owns the copyright is extremely difficult, and
>> getting them all to agree to anything is almost impossible; thus large
>> open-source projects rarely make such license changes, or do so with rather
>> dubious legality by getting agreement from current and major past
>> contributors only. I don't know that a national lab is any more likely to
>> be trouble than an individual open-source contributor; at the least they
>> should be easier to get a hold of.
>>
>> Anne
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 5:36 PM Tyler Reddy <tyler.je.reddy at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm just wondering about the 'lowest friction' way to continue
>>> contributing to scipy when your employer owns the copyright to your open
>>> source contributions (but respects the license used by the project).
>>>
>>> In short, Los Alamos would want me to put one line in one file that says
>>> they 'own' my contributions under the license of the project after Date
>>> xx/yy/zzzz. Hopefully that's a reasonable compromise (they originally
>>> wanted to put a line in each file & I said that definitely would not fly).
>>>
>>> Not sure how annoyed people would be by that, or what specific file
>>> would be used, but they have been accommodating so if there's a request on
>>> the scipy end I could bring it up with them.
>>>
>>> The biggest drawback I'm aware of is that changes to licenses may
>>> sometimes require (?) the involvement of the contributors (copyright
>>> holders)--if one such copyright holder is a national lab instead of a
>>> single individual, this might make the process a bit clunkier.
>>>
>>> Best wishes,
>>> Tyler
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>>>
>>
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>
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