Kowari Legal Status

Situation

Northrup Grumman refuses to allow open source developers to release a new version of Kowari Metastore, software that is licensed under the MPL 1.1.

The big US defence contractor bought the company that had initiated Kowari, Tucana, when they had financial difficulties. The main product was Tucana Knowledge Suite, a scalable RDF database with all the trimmings. That was straight commercial closed-source, but in parallel the open source Kowari Metastore was developed (presumably sharing much of the same codebase, although TKS had things missing from Kowari).

Northrup Grumman have told the Kowari lead, David Wood that any attempt to release Kowari version 1.1 could cause irreparable harm to their company. So David's resigned from the project and had lead to a general feeling of fear with regards to future status of Kowari. Since Topaz plans to use Kowari as the triples database of choice and it is already integrated with Fedora, we need legal clarity on the issue.

March 20, 2006

We talked to Mitch Kapor of OSAF and he recommended we talk to [http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ Software Freedom Law Center] to get legal clarity.

Exchanged emails with Eben Moglen who has assigned Richard Fontana as the counsel to help us through this.

March 23, 2006

Setup direct contact with few of the developers/admins of Kowari to get an idea on what their plans are.

March 24, 2006

Steve Borostyan, CFO, PLoS, has signed and returned the retainer agreement after a conference call with Richard. Software Freedom Law Center will look into publicly available knowledge and give us an update.

April 11, 2006

Sent and email to Richard for an update on status and in a quick conference call, the update is:

1. SFLC believes Kowari is open source because of its adoption of MPL
2. The precise status of copyright/trademark on Kowari not understood
3. They believe the next best step is to contact Northrop Grumman and get their view on things.

We accepted their advice.

April 12, 2006

Had a conference call with Andre Muys, Andrew Newman and Paul Gearon of Kowari to bounce a few ideas of them. They were glad to hear that we are getting legal advice on the main issues, but also have taken/taking active steps to keep the project going:

1. Renaming to Mulgara
2. Forking of source
3. Hosting to a new site (NG might have claim to the sourceforge project too)

They plan to try and make this public in the next couple weeks. We will migrate to Mulgara as soon as that is done.

Forgot to add that the situation was taken verbatim from http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/10/northrup-grumman-and-kowari/

Response from Richard:

Initial attempts to get through to Brian Ippolito were unsuccessful; after some effort I finally got to speak to Michael Wallach today, who I think is in a higher position in the NG legal department. We spoke at some length, and I explained our views to him (basically, the MPL means what it says), but he was unwilling to commit to any position unless I wrote to him formally, which I am now doing. To the extent that he gave any position, I didn't think it made much sense (he seemed to suggest that there's some issue over whether a version of Kowari now publicly available ought not to have released, but he was very vague). He sounded unfamiliar with basic open source licensing issues.

I am going to discuss with Eben what we should do next (whether we should give NG a bit more time to make a statement in writing, or just go ahead with certifying Kowari as free software, giving others the right to modify (and fork the project if necessary)).

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I have asked if we can get the certification as folks are planning to fork to Mulgara anyway.

Pinged Richard again and here is his response:

Michael Wallach, the NG lawyer, had asked us for several days to consult with his staff and prepare a response, correcting any errors in his Jan. 4 letter if necessary. I'll send Michael Wallach a reminder today, telling him there is urgency. I still think it would be better to get their response, but if we don't hear back from them shortly, we'll advise you on how to proceed without knowing their position.

Got an email from Richard saying the NG lawyer plans to send a detailed response on Tuesday May 23, 2006 to him. The NG lawyer has been swamped, but the general tone of his email sounds quite good.

Here is the response from Michael Wallach, the NGC lawyer:

Dear Richard:
This e-mail is further to the recent conversation that we had concerning
the "Kowari" code in the public domain.  Northrop Grumman respects the
rights that users of the public domain version of Kowari receive under
the Mozilla public use license.  The Company agrees that the Mozilla
license gives users of Kowari benefits and obligations relating to the
public domain version of Kowari and further agrees that it, too, must
respect the rights that such  users receive under the  license.
Northrop Grumman intends that the public domain version of Kowari
software made available under the Mozilla license is and will remain
free software and recognizes that Kowari code that has been checked into
publically accessible software repositories is available to anyone who
complies with the terms of the  license.

The comments made in my letter of January 4, which you discussed with
me, were directed to the review of modifications paid for by Northrop
Grumman for the version of Kowari purchased by Northrop Grumman with its
purchase of title to the "Tucana" software from Tucana Technologies.
The letter was not intended to frustrate the rights of developers
operating under the Mozilla license.  We apologize if statements in the
letter created uncertainty in the open source community over the Kowari
project.   It was certainly not the intention of the company to have
this occur.  If you believe that posting this letter will help to dispel
erroneous inferences drawn from the letter, please accept this as
permission to post this e-mail.

Northrop Grumman remains committed to the dissemination and use of
Kowari under the terms of the Mozilla license and to expand the Kowari
community, and looks forward to working with the open source community
on the Kowari project to release a next version of Kowari.

Thank you for taking the time to bring this matter to our attention.
Michael

While the general tone of the email is quite good, I am not quite happy with the "review of modifications" statement. From our interpretations of facts, we get the impression that NGC had asked David Wood and co. to submit the modifications back to Sourceforge which case that would also be covered by MPL license. This confusion needs clarity as the changes could have been folder into Mulgara. Richard has agreed with this and we are going to have a conference call with David this week to close some aspects of this misunderstanding.

Had a conference call with David Wood and Richard Fontana to get David to brief Richard on the history of his work with NGC. Brainstorming with Richard afterwords, we figure the best thing to do is to try and get Michael get his business people involved. Richard will send an email to him stating the same.

Moving this to next milestone.

Received email from Richard stating Michael Wallach is amenable to having a conference call next week. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship...:)

Conference call with NGC went very well. It was Terry Solins (Project Manager Tucana Product, I think), Michael Wallach (Senior Counsel) and Richard Fontant. Difficult to say from talking to them what the original confusion was about, but ignored that and focused on getting clarifications with respect to Kowari trademark and status of source code in Sourceforge. They agreed to everything and asked Richard to frame the letter, which he did and sent. Got their acceptance and have mailed it to the Kowari mailing list.

Turns out that Terry called David Wood directly and he recommended that NGC change the licensing on Kowari to OSL 3.0. He believes that this would prevent NGC from flexing its muscles again. I was informed of this conversation both by David and Terry independently. Discussed this with Richard Fontana and decided on the following:

• Topaz Foundation should not get involved in the trust building discussion between NGC and Kowari developers. Value add is very little unless specifically asked for by one of the parties
• We recommend that they (NGC and Kowari developers) have a open frank discussion with regards to business interests and compromises that need to be made. If they still feel that they need to move to a new license, Richard (and Software Freedom Law Center) would help resolving the legal issues around it.

I have framed and sent an email to Terry copying Richard and Michael Wallach in.

Closing the ticket. At this stage we have managed to remove the legal cloud around Kowari. Moving forward whether the developers decide to go with Mulgara or Kowari is their concern and we will piggy back of either. Now it is a process issue, and unless asked for we will not step in.

Milestone Bugs deleted