Meeting OSS-Watch

Yesterday we had a very informative meeting with Ross and Rowen from OSS-Watch. As in a previous post I narrowed all the possible licences down to five. With help from the OSS-Watch team we where able to discount two of the licences immediately. This all relates to the actions of the OAI in streamlining the licences that they approve.

This left the options of three licences. One area I never thought of in relation to the licences was the sustainability of the project. It just never occurred that the licence selected for WebPA now could have such a knock on effect for the future. However Oss-Watch have reassured us that we can change the licence in the future. But as with anything in life there are consequences and further in the future we could end up with a number of WebPA systems around, with different licences attached. In the mean time as a project we will take on board all we have learnt from OSS-Watch and get our CLAs sorted immediately.

The meeting has left me with some immediate tasks that need to be sorted out before we get too far down the line. One of the most important to set up a IPR Registry for the project.

Other interesting elements gleamed from the meeting where DOAP and the Google Summer of Code. DOAP we have sorted, and only took a very small amount of time. For such an easy task I would suggest all open source project get a DOAP file sorted out. The DOAP file will hopefully be used by OSS-Watch and others as the system takes off, helping to make our project and code become more discoverable.

The Google Summer of code is very interesting, but at the moment I feel that we are too young to undertake being a mentor. However, I hope that next year we will be a more developed project and have the ability to mentor a student.
You may have noticed that I have still not said which licence we will be using, but untill it has all been confirmed with the management, my lips are sealed.