From: Jeff Squyres (jsquyres_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-09-20 15:56:01
Unfortunately -- it depends. :-\
We've found that many academic institutions actually own most/all of
the work that their employees (e.g., faculty and students) produce,
and therefore the Corporate agreement was necessary. Check your
employment contract, for example; even organization is different.
But some amount of common sense applies here as well: if you're going
to be doing this at work using work-related resources, you should
probably fill out the Corporate agreement anyway. But if you're
going to be doing this at home using non-work resources and your
employer doesn't have claims against the work that you produce
outside of their environment, the individual agreement may be suitable.
I unfortunately cannot give you a definitive answer; IANAL and this
is not legal advice -- all I can tell you is that you'll need to
check with your employer. :-(
Our experience has been that it usually takes a little convincing to
get the Responsible Person to sign the Corporate agreement (to
understand the open source issues, etc.). But after the RP signs the
first agreement, they're much more likely to sign more. So if you're
the first, you'll have to experience a bit of pain to explain the
situation to management/lawyers. But if someone else already did
this in your organization (for some other open source project), it
may be pretty easy for you.
Finally, note that our agreement is almost verbatim the same as the
Apache agreements for this kind of stuff. We directly copied their
text and essentially s/Apache/Open MPI/g. Specifically: we didn't
make this stuff up; we're using a well-established precedent.
On Sep 20, 2007, at 3:40 PM, Jeff Pummill wrote:
> Which would be more appropriate for academic institutions and their
> staff / users / faculty? I would likely be the main person interacting
> with the list. As the Senior Sysadmin for HPC, is the individual
> agreement sufficient?
>
> Jeff Pummill
> University of Arkansas
>
>
> Jeff Squyres wrote:
>> It depends on your situation. If you can contribute as an
>> individual, then the Individual agreement is fine. If you will be
>> contributing as part of a larger organization, then you'll need to
>> submit the Corporate agreement.
>>
>> At issue is whether your employer owns/has claim any work that you
>> produce. IANAL, but my understanding is that it is up to contributor
>> to determine which they should use. Don't take "Individual" just
>> because it's easier -- if your employer does actually have claim on
>> the code or documentation that you produce, the Right Thing to do is
>> to submit the Corporate agreement (with appropriate signatures).
>>
>> The whole goal of these agreements is to keep the intellectual
>> property in Open MPI "clean" such that no one will ever come back to
>> the copyright holders and say "my work is in Open MPI; you owe me
>> money."
>>
>>
>> On Sep 20, 2007, at 3:17 AM, jody wrote:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>>> http://www.open-mpi.org/community/contribute/
>>>>
>>> Is this the
>>> "Open MPI Individual Contributor License Agreement"
>>> ?
>>>
>>> Jody
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> docs mailing list
>>> docs_at_[hidden]
>>> http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/docs
>>
>>
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-- Jeff Squyres Cisco Systems