MapServer Provenance Review

MapServer is a graduated OSGeo project. This page is part of the archive of the incubation process.

Goal

To establish a reasonable comfort level that projects going through incubation do not have improperly contributed code, and that the code is all under the project license.

A code provenance review is desirable because it reduces the risk of the foundation, project developers or software users becoming involved in a legal action or having their use of the software disrupted by sudden removal of improperly contributed code. In particular, many enterprises will not build on open source software projects without some degree of assurance that care is being taken to avoid improper contributions.

It is not the goal to be able to prove that every source file, and every contribution to those files, was contributed properly. The onus is not on us to prove there are no problems. However we want to ensure we do not release code with provenance issues that we could have identified and corrected with a reasonable effort.

Library/Component Review

See spreadsheets.

Code Copyright Review

The objective here is to visit every source file, and identify possible issues, and work to "regularize" things.

See spreadsheets.

• Maintain a list of all copyright holders identified in the review document (see REAMDE in the trunk root of the SVN).

Review Document

The result of the provenance review is two fold. First, there is clarification and "fixes" done during the review. For instance, adding missing copyright notices, or factoring out external libraries. The second is a review report with a fairly detailed list of outstanding issues, ambiguities and information of note.

The review document will be distributed to the project PSC members, as well as the incubation committee. Based on it, the incubation committee may require the project to do additional work, either resolving ambiguities, factoring items out, or rewriting questional components.

When completed, a much briefer form of the review document should be prepared, just listing information that would be pertinent to folks using the project. Essentially a summary. This summary might live in source control as README.LICENSE or something similar.

Copyright Header

It is sufficient to refer to a single copy of the license agreement for the project, but each file should include an indication of what the license is, and the location of the full license document.

The [MapServer] MapServer license text (retrieved from mapserv.c Revision 7147:

   Project:  MapServer
   Purpose:  MapServer CGI mainline.
   Author:   Steve Lime and the MapServer team.

   Copyright (c) 1996-2005 Regents of the University of Minnesota.

   Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
   copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
   to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
   the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
   and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
   Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

   The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
   all copies of this Software or works derived from this Software.

   THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
   OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
   FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
   THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
   LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
   FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
   DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.