[iks-community] IKS Community Agreement for good governance

Mon Nov 16 07:33:32 CET 2009

Dear all,

As I explained (as proxy for John) in the executive board meeting:
We (Salzburg Research) as ccordinators need to herd more sheep than just 
  the software and the consortium contributions. That is why the 
community agreement covers the following ground:

(1) which is the legal entity representing IKS? --> SRFG at present, 
hence there are issues like copyright sharing e.g. with EXTERNAL 
community members. Otherwise IKS cannot claim that community member XYZ 
developed something for/in the context of IKS. We (IKS) may want to 
create a European Interest Group as a neutral legal entity - this also 
needs some organisational effort. Let us know if this is your preferred 
option. We can go that route if there is a majority in favour of it.

(2) good governance includes, but is not restricted to software 
licenses: it includes that members of the community undertake NOT to 
introduce elements IKS for which others have rights/licenses/patents.

(3) The license for IKS reference implementations is BSD, simplified in 
the sense of not being US-based, legally.
However, we also have to cater for the external manufacturer's case, 
where they might want to patent a bathroom mirror with content display 
functionality without also patenting the whole IKS implementation!

The agreement covers these (and more) different aspects and 
contributor's roles. It is an OPEN DRAFT after significant counsel from 
legal and OSS versant sources.

It is intended to cover patent cases for Duravit on the one side of the 
spectrum, as well as the Apache/BSD style open source objectives of IKS 
for which we are in full agreement with industrial partners concerning 
easy access an no legal strings. And the spectrum does not stop there:
it has to also cover contributions which are neither soft- nor hardware, 
but good ideas coming from the community, e.g. the copyright for a 
compelling user story. If an academic partner uses such a story for a 
journal paper, then it would be good governance to attribute it to the 
right (community) source.

Please read the several elements of the agreement carefully, identify 
real legal problem zones and ambiguities and then discuss them with us 
so that we can tighten it up.

It may at first siight, look like "contract overengineering", but we 
have to cover more issues than just sharing some OSS. This is due to the 
different contractual liabilities of coordinator, consortium partners, 
and bona fide community members of IKS.

Summary: this is our DRAFT - open for discussion - but it needs to be 
closed before significant contributions do come on-line, i.e. early next 
year.

Best regards,

Wernher

Wolfgang Maass wrote the following on 10.11.2009 17:59:
> Hi,
> 
> fully agree with Bertrand's distinction between a) and b). We need a 
> solution for a) and for b). There might be organizations and companies 
> that cannot walk along the OSS path for all software modules, as we 
> already heard in Salzburg. So, how can be integrate this software 
> without reinventing the wheel every time it gets to using such a Non-OSS 
> module? I did that several times already and this is really time 
> consuming because every company has its own agreement.
> 
> The question is whether we can simplify this within the limits of IKS. I 
> hope that we come up with a very simple procedure for case b) - 
> hopefully a one-pager is sufficient. The devil is in the details and 
> usually appears late.
> 
> many greetings
> 
> Wolfgang
> 
> Am 10.11.2009 um 10:34 schrieb Bertrand Delacretaz:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> Didn't have time to read all of the proposed agreement yet, just one
>> quick (but important IMHO) comment on Wolfgang's comments.
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Wolfgang Maass 
>> <wolfgang.maass at unisg.ch> wrote:
>>
>>> ...Copyrights or patents? I suggest that we keep both issues 
>>> separated. Sharing
>>> of "patent issues" should be easy for all research partners, i.e., 
>>> research
>>> partners should not be limited by patents during the project and 
>>> thereafter.
>>> This might be different for sharing patents between commercial partners.
>>> Copyright is different and probably less complicated. ...
>>
>>> ...Furthermore I suggest that we make public to all IKS partners who 
>>> is sharing
>>> which patents with whom...
>>
>>> ...we will also know which software must be replaced for IKS
>>> solutions under OSS/Free license agreements....
>>
>>> ...We also need a procedure for setting up such patent sharing 
>>> agreements incl.
>>> documentation, signing and arbitration services....
>>
>> All this sounds very scary and complicated for a small company looking
>> at using IKS stuff...
>>
>> A very simple and effective way of separating which IKS components
>>
>> a) are fully open source, no strings attached
>>
>> or
>>
>> b) require legal scrutiny before use
>>
>> Would be to work on components which fit into the a) category on a
>> neutral ground...and you see me coming I guess, the Apache Software
>> Foundation is without a doubt one of the best such neutral grounds -
>> as exemplified by the Apache HTTP server project, Hadoop, Tomcat,
>> CMIS, Subversion and many others.
>>
>> This fully resonates with my proposal (coming up later this week at
>> the workshop, based on [1]) to incubate as much as possible of the IKS
>> infrastructure at Apache. All of what I'm suggesting there fits in the
>> a) category, it's no rocket science, just a state of the art modular
>> RESTful framework.
>>
>> Let's create a framework for an IKS semantic engine there, with APIs
>> for plugins that do the actual complicated work, so that community
>> members who want to create non-open source or patent-encumbered
>> modules can do so, with a clear separation between those and the
>> common parts. Apache does not allow any exceptions to its license for
>> software that it distributes, so the IKS components developed there
>> are clearly usable by anyone who accepts the Apache License.
>>
>> My hope is that most useful modules would fit in the a) category (and
>> thus could live at Apache as well), but if some don't, having them
>> live under a different umbrella would make that very clear. And of
>> course, working in a modular way allows non-IKS people to provide
>> additional modules, which is also a big plus.
>>
>> My 2 swiss centimes...I don't mean that the suggested agreement is not
>> needed, but asking potential users to fully understand is way too much
>> for small shops.
>>
>> -Bertrand
>>
>> [1] 
>> http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/main/iks-pragmatic-view.html
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> 
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-- 
Wernher Behrendt
Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft
Knowledge Based Information Systems
Jakob-Haringer Strasse 5/II
5020 Salzburg
Austria

email   wernher.behrendt at salzburgresearch.at
phone   +43 (0)662 2288 409
fax     +43 (0)662 2288 222
http://www.salzburgresearch.at