[aaloa promoters] Important (legal) issues on the project incubation

[Francesco Furfari]

  Dear All,

after the positive results of the voting I would like to discuss with 
you about the implications of the incubation process.

1)  Project representative
As described in the Manifesto, the leader becomes part of the Governing 
Board.
If AALOA will be a federation of projects we need to know about the 
status of the projects, and each project must be represented on the GB.
Simple rules for reporting the status of the project should be defined.

2)  Legal Implications for the AALOA domain
The project will be hosted under the aaloa.org domain (i.e 
zb4osgi.aaloa.org)
So there are legal implications on the content published on the project 
web site.
We should define a procedure to record the personal data of the project 
leader,
and we should have him sign a document for the taking of responsibility.
( who prepares the document template)

3) Licensing model
Each software  project Must follow an open source policy.
AALOA has to guarantee that the source code is always accessible by 
providing a common repository (SVN) that must be used by the incubated 
projects.
By the way, each project can use a different license, for instance GPL, 
LGPL-like or permissive license like ASL2.0.
In the future we can decide to converge to a unique license, but I guess 
it can be decided later when we will start to plan a shared development 
for one (or more)  AAL platform(s) endorsed by AALOA.
Any opinion here?

4) Committers work and external code contributions
Each project is organized around a community of developers that can be 
employee of some company.
We should avoid claims from the companies about any software 
contribution provided to the project.
I would like the employer signs a document that states he is aware of 
the work done by his employees in the incubated project.
What about the patents?
Any contribution received by people external to the project should be 
accepted
only if the IPR are granted with the same license used by the project.
Should the contribution rights be donated? to the incubated project?  to 
AALOA?

Any opinion is warmly welcome.
Please comment reporting the bullets

Regards,
Francesco