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Legal stuff
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Description

List of things we'd like some Legal aid with:

  • Contributor agreement (T15121)
    • to reduce risks of copyright violation from code contributions
    • to facilitate ban if there are violations, with more transparent explanations
  • The trademarks/copyrights - What can be attributed to Phorge? What remains under Phacility?
    • (T15006) Trademark: we have done our best to rebrand from Phabricator® to Phorge. We keep "Phabricator" just to mention that, and for critical internal structures heavily wired on that. But we are available to update also these parts, if requested.
    • Copyright: contributions from Phacility are already released under Apache 2.0 and other contributions will happen under the same license.
      • In case of copyright concerns, look at the git history of an individual file to find main copyright holders. WHEREAS, collaboration is already enabled thanks to Apache 2.0, so any new contributor doesn't have to worry about past contributions to contribute.
  • Content of https://we.phorge.it/source/phorge/browse/master/NOTICE:

Portions of this software were developed by various contributors, who retain copyright on their work. These works are licensed to Phacility, Inc.

  • Formal organization for Phorge?
    • Right now we are simply a bunch of volunteers taking vitamins and that seems enough in medium terms.
  • (T15033) Do we need a GDPR warning?
    • As long as we are a bunch of volunteers taking vitamins, and as long as "Phorge.it" has no economic relationship, we do not need any GDPR compliance AFAIK.
  • TOS for signing up to we.phorge.it
    • to simplify ban of people bombarding our infrastructure, with more transparent explanations
  • (T15322) Default license footer for this site
    • to enable collaboration, just like happens in Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc. (otherwise it is all rights reserved)

Revisions and Commits

Event Timeline

This ties into T15009: Evaluate legal organization format ("Foundation") - the majority of foundations for open source will support retaining assets like trademarks/copyrights. It would also be useful if they assist in acquiring them in the first place.

avivey triaged this task as High priority.Jun 23 2021, 18:27

Just to add clarification around T15009: Evaluate legal organization format ("Foundation"), we can opt to create our own organization instead of joining an existing foundation however that involves a lot more paperwork, submissions, legal stuff, etc. The foundations are a means for speeding along that process, where Apache Foundation, Linux Foundation, etc. create their own non-profit organizational legal entity then "adopt" sub-projects which automatically inherit and become part of their entity as long as we abide by their agreements, largely focused around providing open source projects run by open source communities. In turn they provide benefits like being the actual legal entity that owns the trademarks/copyrights/assets for the project, some even offer to be owner of domain names etc. along with providing some legal assistance for e.g. open source license law or even for initially acquiring trademarks/copyrights.

If we decide to join one of those foundations instead of creating our own that will give us a boost with a number of legal things related to assets and donations etc.. One of my concerns is what the process is for the project leaving the foundation. For example in the case of Apache Foundation I don't think that's an option as AF takes on the project as their own and only they can decide to release the project again -- ultimately if we have a disagreement with AF we would be forced to re-fork and re-brand under different legal entity.

My thinking was that we would start with a foundation for now so we don't get too caught up in creating an official organization, but I would definitely like to leave it open in the future to becoming our own organization separate from a foundation. This is why I'm currently leaning towards Linux Foundation or Software Freedom Conservancy as I believe those allow the project to split off later.

A big bug we have now is the absence of a free license in the footer.

Example reasonable config for our website, to be compatible with Phorge and Stack Overflow etc.:

https://we.phorge.it/config/edit/ui.footer-items/

[
  {
    "name": "Community contents and multimedia files are in Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA) or Apache 2.0 (at your option) unless otherwise noted."
  }
]

Interestingly we are probably in a relaxed situation on certain external legal issues, but we still need to work on our internal issues such as

T15322: Footer: specify a default Libre license for Phorge contents