Copyright/Use Statement

[jdinan]

Issue

This came up while incorporating new teams tests into our test suite.

We seem to be missing a statement regarding how the content of the OpenSHMEM specification may be used. Here is the current IP statement in the OpenSHMEM specification:

The OpenSHMEM specification belongs to Open Source Software Solutions, Inc. (OSSS), a non-profit organization, under an agreement with HPE. For a current list of Contributors and Collaborators, please see http://www.openshmem.org/site/Contributors/. We gratefully acknowledge support from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Extreme Scale Systems Center and the continuing support of the Department of Defense.

SOS uses the text from the specification verbatim in our manpages and also incorporates example programs into our test suites. The intent of OpenSHMEM is to allow the community to use the spec in this way, but our IP statement doesn't grant us permission to do this. IIUC, we need some sort of use statement to go alongside the IP ownership statement to enable this.

[jdinan]

The original issue didn't do a good job of capturing my concern. I updated the text to hopefully better capture the issue that we ran into while incorporating new teams examples into the SOS test suite.

The issue we have is essentially that the spec doesn’t grant permission to use the contents of the document e.g. in unit tests and manpages. In both cases, SOS re-releases that content and need to figure out what license or copyright statement to put on those artifacts. From the text we have in the spec, it’s not clear how to do this.

[RaymondMichael]

We could tack on something like, "The unmodified contents of this specification, including the code examples, are free to be included in other publications. A copy of this copyright must accompany them."

[jdinan]

This may be too restrictive, since it's necessary to make some modifications in order to include the text in manpages (or a user guide) and runnable unit tests. Also, it would be great to introduce a normal copyright statement (e.g. Copyright (C) 2020 OSSS).

[jdinan]

@RaymondMichael @swpoole Any chance of incorporating guidance on use in OpenSHMEM 1.5? This came up again recently while working on documentation -- the implications of copying text or examples from the spec are unclear. As an example, the following is adapted from the BSD license:

Redistribution of the contents of this document, with or without modification, is permitted provided
that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions must contain a reference to this document.

2. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse
or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

[jdinan]

@RaymondMichael @swpoole A corollary to this request would be to include an open source LICENSE file in the LaTeX source tree that we have posted on GitHub. This file isn't included in the PDFs that we publish, so there is no immediate need for it. But, if we were to feel comfortable using a BSD license (or any other license, just taking BSD as a commonly used example) for the sources, we could work backward from that to determine which terms should be put into the PDF.

[RaymondMichael]

We're starting to write up something for the lawyers to take a look at.

[RaymondMichael]

@jdinan, Devil's Advocate: Section 1 of the contributors' agreement says Contributions are made available to others with a BSD-3 license. I read this as saying that the standard can be copied and modified. Admittedly, the statements in the specification, contributors' agreement, and the software license could be better harmonized.