Foundation

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Overte Foundation Public Statement

30th June 2011

Today we’re pleased to announce the creation of the Overte Foundation. The Overte Foundation is a non-profit corporation being set up by the OpenSimulator core developers along with the help of Michael Cerquoni, the president of OSgrid, and Ben Esplin of Pillsbury, a US law firm.

The organization’s immediate objective is to formalize the basis under which OpenSimulator source code is contributed and redistributed.

To this end, we plan to establish a Contributor’s License Agreement (CLA). Under this agreement, each OpenSimulator developer, including the core developers, will continue to retain copyright over their code but will also grant an explicit copyright license over their contributions to the Overte Foundation.

Thus, the Overte Foundation will become the official OpenSimulator distributor. As a legal entity, it will be well placed to deal with code origin or other issues, if any should ever arise.

Once the CLA is in place, we plan to remove the current OpenSimulator contribution restrictions. This includes the restriction that prevents contributions from people who have studied the viewer’s codebase within the past 6 months.

Please see the Foundation FAQ for more details.

The Overte Foundation will very likely also act to promote and support OpenSimulator in other ways. It could also act to promote and support the larger open-source virtual environment/world ecosystem.

This is all a work in progress but we wanted to announce this now in order to let people know what we’re doing and in order to get feedback. This OpenSimulator mailing list thread can host discussion (you'll need to join the mailing list to take part).

The initial Overte Foundation board consists of

• Justin Clark-Casey (President)
• Crista Lopes (Treasurer)
• Melanie Thielker (Secretary)
• Michael Cerquoni
• Ben Esplin

(Many thanks to Ener Hax for the logo!)