Bryce,

Sorry for the delay on this. In addition to the holidays we have several financial deadlines hit us around this time of year, and I got pulled into that more than I’d planned for.

On DigitalOcean: given that we’re agreed about the issue, the next step with them would be to have a conversation with their legal department about some kind of change. Ideally that would be a change to the current ToS, but between us, we’d be satisfied with an agreement that’s specific to Conservancy and its member projects.

Unfortunately, we’ve checked and we don’t seem to have any good contacts currently at DigitalOcean legal, so we’d have to go through your contact to talk about this.

Before we initiate that, I think it makes sense to look at this other provider’s ToS and see whether we can avoid the issue completely. If your testing so far hasn’t revealed any issues, can you please point me at them, and we’ll take a look?

Best regards,

​


On 01/04/2018 02:35 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Hi Brett,

Just checking in again to see if you've had a chance to look at this.

We've just received another hosting sponsorship offer from a different
company, which I'm going to test out.  Let me know when you'd like to
take a look at their T&C's too.

Bryce

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 02:19:18PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:

Hi Brett,

Hope you had a great Christmas.  I suspect you're tied up with end of
the year activities, but I wanted to followup regarding DigitalOcean, as
I'd love to move forward on setting it up soon.  Please let me know
status when you get a chance.

Thanks,
Bryce

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 10:58:24AM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 11:28:05AM -0500, Brett Smith wrote:

Bryce,

We did get the process started, and step one is always reviewing the
terms of service before we create an account.  Digital Ocean's is at
<https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/>.

Wow, thanks for checking into that.  Yes, some of this looks like it
could potentially be a problem.  It's sleezy when hosting providers seek
ownership over user-supplied content!


There we ran into section
2.5, which asks us to grant Digital Ocean "a worldwide, non-exclusive,
perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and
transferable license to use, aggregate, reproduce, distribute, prepare
derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exploit such
User Content in connection with [DO's services and businesses]."

I notice their policy seems to differentiate between their "Website" and
their "Services".  The latter is what would affect Inkscape.

Section 2.5 asks for grants for both Website and Service.  The above
quote appears to be from the portion dealing with User Content uploads
to the Website.  There is a similar portion dealing with content
uploaded to the Services, but the wording is a bit different:

    By submitting any User Content to the Services other than on the
    Website, you hereby do and shall grant us a worldwide,
    non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid,
    sublicensable and transferable license to use, aggregate, reproduce,
    distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform such
    User Content solely for the purpose of providing the Services. For
    clarity, the foregoing licenses granted to us and our users does not
    affect your other ownership or license rights in your User Content,
    including the right to grant additional licenses to your User
    Content, unless otherwise agreed in writing.

Do you think the phrasing "solely for the purpose of providing the
Services", and the clarifying second sentence places adequate
limitations on what they're requiring here?  Could the purpose of this
text be to just try and establish that we allow them permission to
retransmit our content on their services?

Section 2.6 seems to suggest they recognize that open source code will
be hosted on their platform, which I guess is good, but I don't
understand at all what the section's purpose is.  CC BY-NC-SA
4.0 is a license we use and I assume it's not compatible.  Does this
section imply they wish to relicense materials as BY-NC-SA?  It's not
clear to me what this section applies to exactly.

I'm glad you're reviewing this -- I always find these license phrasings
to be so confusing.


This has the *potential* to be an issue because we (both Conservancy and
the Inkscape team) can't really grant this license for work that other
parties released under most FOSS licenses.  This section effectively
asks for us to grant an extremely permissive license to Digital Ocean
for all the User Content anyone uploads.

Yes, agreed, we don't want there to be any question that material
covered under GPLv2+ would be relicensed by them to some other license.


It's not uncommon for service providers to have some kind of clause like
this, but it's usually narrower.  For example, AWS' TOS just say you
agree not to upload anything illegal or against their policies.

Are you planning to upload any software to Digital Ocean?  This could be
uploading software to publish; or a virtual machine image for them to
run; anything like that.  Basically, anything you can tell us about your
plans to use the service can help us better understand how much we
should be concerned about this, and what our next steps might be.

Yes, uploading software (or snippets of software such as patches) is a
primary intended use for this service.  The plan would include hosting
of discussion forums, mailing lists, wiki's and other software platforms
under the purpose of furthering developer-to-developer and
user-to-developer collaboration.  Thus, we will be dealing with a wealth
of User Content for which clarity of copyright+license provenance is
going to be imperative.  We would not wish to use the service if it adds
any uncertainty about the ownership of our code.

Thanks again for looking into this agreement and spotting the potential
issue!

Bryce


On 12/11/2017 11:41 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:

Hi Brett, just following up to see if you've had a chance to look into
setting this up yet?

Bryce

On Sun, Dec 03, 2017 at 05:03:31PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:

Resolved:
---------
SFC should register with DigitalOcean so we can	accept their offer and
proceed with setting up	 services on their platform.


Votes:
------

| Board Member         | 1. |
| -------------------- |:--:|
| Bryce Harrington     | a. |
| Josh Andler          |    |
| Tavmjong Bah         | a. |
| Ted Gould            | a. |
| Martin Owens         | a. |
| Marc Jeanmougin      | a. |
| Chris Rogers         | a. |


On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 05:32:28PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:

Your vote is needed to accept hosting sponsorship from DigitalOcean.

1.  Accept DigitalOcean's offer of $500 credit on their virtual hosting
    system for use in provisioning various Inkscape web services.  Add
    DigitalOcean as a Bronze level sponsor for 2018.  Authorize
    Conservancy to initiate registration with DigitalOcean for Inkscape.

    - [ ] a. Yes, accept DigitalOcean's sponsorship
    - [ ] b. No

Votes:
------

| Board Member         | 1. |
| -------------------- |:--:|
| Bryce Harrington     |    |
| Josh Andler	       |    |
| Tavmjong Bah         |    |
| Ted Gould            |    |
| Martin Owens	       |    |
| Marc Jeanmougin      |    |
| Chris Rogers	       |    |


Resolved:
---------

Background:
-----------

In 2017, the Inkscape Board [solicited sponsorship offers][1] for web
hosting.  We [received an offer][2] from DigitalOcean that provides
a credit for $500 in service on their virtual hosting platform.  It
doesn't match all the requirements we had called for, but it may be able
to address near term service needs while we continue our search.

Registration with DigitalOcean requires entry of financial information
so will need to be performed by the Software Freedom Conservancy staff
for us.  This vote authorizes them to do so.

[1]: https://sourceforge.net/p/inkscape/mailman/message/36074233/
[2]: https://www.mail-archive.com/inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net/msg01019.html

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