[Zope-dev] [Checkins] SVN: zc.buildout/ Moved to github

[Jens Vagelpohl]

On Aug 18, 2012, at 12:46 , Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net> wrote:

> On 2012-8-18 10:39, Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
>> Hi Hanno,
>> 
>> Legally this must be a fork then and I'm not sure it can be released as official Zope Foundation software anymore if you make releases from GitHub.
> 
> Doesn't the name zc.buildout imply that it is a Zope Corp project instead of a Zope Foundation one? The author has also never been listed as the foundation but Jim personally, which seems to imply zc.buildout never was Zope Foundation-owned software.

Hi Wichert,

Clearly, Jim is the "father" of that software and it has been developed in large part for Zope Corporation, hence the name "zc.buildout". However, that's not all there is to "ownership" of code on svn.zope.org.

If you read the contributor agreements[1] all committers to svn.zope.org signed, submitting code to svn.zope.org also meant you entered into a legal agreement with the Zope Foundation regarding that code. Code submitted to svn.zope.org is from that moment on half-owned by the Zope Foundation. That means you cannot unilaterally just declare code removed from svn.zope.org, which is my point about the last checkin to the zc.buildout package. Everyone is free to fork code. But removing stuff from svn.zope.org requires approval from you as the original owner *and* the ZF as legal co-owner of anything stored on svn.zope.org.

Caveat: I'm not a lawyer, that's just how I interpret the contributor agreement.

jens

[1] http://foundation.zope.org/agreements/ZopeFoundation_Committer_Agreement