Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to Request for Comment: dotLRN Technology Governance
Who retains copyright for a new applet? The individual developer, company or organization which owns the code. Once the ".LRN Consortium" is established we would encourage transferring the copyright to the consortium.Open Force's includes this:
An applet writer owns the copyright to their code. We encourage applet writers to release their code under the GPL. The TAB will also encourage contributors to assign copyright to an impartial third party, but this will not be a requirement in any way.The only real difference is that Al names a particular third party - the dotLRN Consortium. Al's wording implies that this is not a requirement, while Ben's explicitly states it. Ben's wording includes the word impartial, Al earlier defines the consortium as being neutral, i.e. not dominated by any particular institution or vendor.
Open Force's vision does not include any notion of forming anything like the consortium but note that it does suggest that the TAB will encourage assignment of copyright to an unamed impartial third party.
Al originally mentioned perhaps recommending the FSF. My comment to him was that there are people out there, for better or worse, who don't care for Richard Stallman in particular and by association perhaps the FSF. I thought the consortium might be more acceptible to some. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I know that this proposal wasn't made with the kind of motive Neophytos is worried about.
As you can see both proposals are actually very close on this particular point.
The key differences lie in different areas. One very major difference is that MIT proposes the establishment of something similar to the X Consortium and a solid business plan for establishing dotLRN. This implies some top-down structure to governance, with broad direction being set by the consortium ("the people who fund it").
Open Force's is much more bottom-up - a technical committee sets direction, and if user groups form around future releases and decide to market it, that's fine. If not, that's fine. There's no official hook on which to hang a request for foundation funding, nothing like that. There's no notion of an "official" distribution.
In other words even more decentralized than OpenACS is today.
Personally I think the consortium approach would work very well for dotLRN, and in particular I think the chances of broadening the funding base significantly is much higher under this approach than under the technical-driven, decentralized, bottom-up, almost free-for-all type approach proposed by Open Force.
Also a legal entity such as MIT proposes can apply for and receive grants directly. There are advantages to this. The reasoning is similar to that which led to the Apache Foundation being formed. Here's something from the Apache Foundation page:
The Project Management Committee (PMC) is a group of committers who take responsibility for the long-term direction of the projects in their area. There is a single PMC for each parent project (Jakarta, XML, HTTP Server, etc) which is commissioned directly by the Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors. The PMC is in turn responsible for many sub-projects, each with its own group of committers.In other words there's a degree of top-down direction provided by the Board of Directors similar to Al's description of the Executive Board, and the PMC's have a certain degree of responsibility to the Board of Directors.
Actually the Apache Foundation page on mangement is worth looking at ...
