MapServer Provenance Review

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.

For MapServer the copyright header looks like this:

tbd