OpenLayers Provenance Review

Committers

• Erik Uzureau
• Christopher R. Schmidt
• John Frank
• Schuyler Erle
• Tim Schaub
• Paul Spencer

Contributions have been made to the project by:

• Corey Puffault
• Jeff Dege
• Sean Gilles
• Arnd Wipperman
• Phil Lindsay

Provenance Review

There are several tools used in OpenLayers development, which are not part of the code itself, but are included in the source tree for convenience.

• tests/ directory:
  • Test Another Way -- testing framework. BSD Licensed. Included in OpenLayers as run-tests.html in this directory.
  • All other files in this directory are copyright MetaCarta, Inc. and are released under the BSD license of the project. The test files do not have copyright headers.

• tools/
  • mergejs.py, toposort.py, shrinksafe.py are all tools released as part of the OpenLayers project, under the project license.
  • jsmin.py/jsmin.c -- Javascript compression tools. BSD licensed. Included in OpenLayers tools directory: used only for building.
  • Toposort.py has information on the provencance/source of the code in the header. It is released under a BSD style license.

• lib/
  • Rico.Corner and Rico.Color -- libraries used for building more advanced UI components. Apache licensed. Included from Rico libraries as lib/Rico/Corner.js, lib/Rico/Color.js.
  • lib/OpenLayers/Ajax.js, lib/OpenLayers/BaseTypes.js and lib/OpenLayers/Events.js each use components which were originally included in the Prototype library. These components have been integrated directly into OpenLayers, and do not bear too much similarity to their Prototype source. Prototype is BSD licensed. These three files need to have Prototype information added to the headers of the source files.
  • On inspection on Feb 6, 2007, each Javascript file in lib/OpenLayers referenced the project repository-license.txt, and notes the copyright holder is MetaCarta, Inc., and includes a copyright date.

• examples/
  • Each example file has been contributed to OpenLayers under the same process as committing code, and therefore the code in these examples is considered to be under the project license, although this copyright is not explicitly stated in each file.

• art/
  • The SVG files in art/ are original artwork by developers of the OpenLayers project, and are released under the project license.

• doc/
  • The documentation in the doc/ directory was written by developers of the OpenLayers project, and is released under the project license.

• theme/
  • The default CSS file included with OpenLayers was writtne by developers of the OpenLayers project, and is released under the project license.

• img/
  • Some images in the img/ directory are generated from the SVG files in the art/ directory: these files are dervied from the source SVG, and are therefore licensed under the project license.
  • Any image which is not generated from the SVG in the art/ directory was created for use by the OpenLayers project, and is released under the project license.

All contributors to OpenLayers are required to file an ICLA or CCLA granting copyright to MetaCarta, Inc. before contributions can be included in the OpenLayers trunk. This policy has been enforced in all cases: no patches have been allowed to enter trunk without an attached copyright assignment agreement. Therefore, all OpenLayers code as released falls under the copyright of MetaCarta, Inc.

ICLA/CCLA

Before a contribution from a given user is accepted into the OpenLayers repository, the user contributing must fill out one of either a:

• "Individual Contributor License Agreement" -- http://openlayers.org/icla.txt
• "Corporate Contributor License Agreement" -- http://openlayers.org/ccla.txt

These files are framed largely on the Apache Foundation's ICLA/CCLA documents, with only minor changes to accomodate for the difference in OpenLayers project.

All ICLA/CCLAs are then submitted to the PSC list, and kept on file by MetaCarta, Inc., and can be made available upon request.

Project License

Currently, the OpenLayers project while under development is released under a modified BSD license, which includes an additional claim:

This license grants no rights to any components related to natural language
processing, free text querying, or unstructured information retrieval.  This 
license grants no rights to components that implement inventions on which
MetaCarta has patents or has filed applications for patents. 

This clause applies only to the code in the trunk/ repository until such a time as the code is released. When a release is prepared, all references to repository-license are changed to release-license, and the license on the API/hosted version of the OpenLayers code is always the release license, and not the repository license.

It is MetaCarta's hope that as part of the OSGeo incubation process, copyright of OpenLayers can be assigned to OSGeo, in which case the desire is to remove the repository-license from the repository entirely, moving back to the standard BSD license.