IP paperwork, Gandhi, and sugar

[David Glazer]

Hi all - 

A few people in the community have noticed that we've been collectively somewhat sloppy in following through on our IP paperwork. See, for example, this thread with Mark from IBM and Tim from Atlassian -- I've excerpted Dan's response below.

The short version is that we all should, as community leaders contributing to the spec process, execute the corporate paperwork (CCLA and Non-Assert), and fill in the public web forms saying that we've done so.  We should also encourage the individuals who are working on the spec to do the equivalent.

I bet you're wondering where Gandhi comes into this ...

There is a story told about Mahatma Gandhi:

A lady brought her son and said he ate too much sugar. She wanted Gandhi to tell him to stop. Gandhi said to bring the child back the next week. The next week she brought the child and Gandhi said “Stop eating sugar child”. And the child did. A month later the lady came back and said “My child has done what you asked, but why could you not have spoken to him the first time I came.” “Lady”, said Gandhi, “a week earlier I was still eating sugar”.

I just finished filling out the forms for Google; please do the same for your companies.

Thanks,

  dG

P.S. Excerpted from Dan's response on that thread:

I'm in 100% agreement with Mark. The good news is that all of the forms 
(CLA, CCLA, Non-Assert) referenced in the OpenSocial spec process are 
transparent in exactly that way. You can see an entry for everyone (or every 
entity) that has submitted the form. Absolutely no entries are redacted; the 
sanitization mentioned in the spec process is done automatically so that all 
contributors to the OpenSocial specification don't have to have their phone 
numbers & mailing addresses published for the world to see (which seems 
desirable, but if others disagree, please speak up). 

Additionally, as for the lack of an abundance of CCLA signatures, that is 
likely a result of our ever evolving process: the OpenSocial v1.0 revision 
is the first time that the CLAs will be officially required before 
specification contributions can be reviewed for inclusion. For prior 
iterations, these forms were not actually complete, so they couldn't have 
been executed. Congratulations to Atlassian for being ahead of the curve. 

Since we're just now at the point of OpenSocial v1.0 where the lack of CLAs 
becomes a blocker, I suspect that we'll see a lot more of people officially 
executing their own CLAs quite soon. 

Form links: 
http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Specification_Process#Cont... 

The bottom-line is that if you're going to contribute to specification 
proposals, you need to have a CLA (and/or CCLA) on file with the OpenSocial 
Foundation, and, if you contribute to the next iteration, when the iteration 
is ready for publication, you'll be expected to sign the non-assert for that 
particular version as well.

=============================

[Dan Peterson]

Thanks, dG.

Folks, please feel free to let me know if you have any questions about this -- or you can direct questions to the opensoci...@googlegroups.com committee -- the folks who created the IPR structure that we approved.

Cheers,

-Dan

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