[Dspace-general] Transfer of copyright to the Foundation

[Michele Kimpton]

Dear members of the DSpace community,

It's now seven years since HP and MIT first collaborated to create the
initial version of DSpace.  Since then, further developments by HP, MIT
and a significant constituency of contributors have refined, added to
and improved that initial version. DSpace has been widely adopted by the
research library community worldwide so that DSpace is  the
leading opensource institutional repository systems in use today.

In 2006 HP and MIT convened an advisory board comprised of  
representatives from
organizations who were using or developing DSpace.  This group
recommended that an independent not-for-profit organization, the DSpace
Foundation, be established to continue to promote and develop the DSpace
system on behalf of the user community. This year, HP and MIT have
set up the DSpace foundation for this purpose.

As a result of the size and complexity the Dspace codebase has now
acquired, as well as the significant DSpace user constituency, both HP
and MIT now feel that it is time to pass over stewardship of the DSpace
codebase to the new DSpace Foundation so that the Foundation can support
the ongoing development of the code and seek funding that will be
necessary to implement enhancements in the future. Both HP and MIT  
are still heavily involved
as board members of the foundation, and both organizations are  
actively working to enhance the
DSpace platform through code contributions and research.

As the joint owners of all copyright in Dspace, HP and MIT have  
transfered
all copyright to the Dspace Foundation to enable it to achieve these  
aims. The code remains under the BSD license
and the Foundation will ensure the code continues to be opensource  
and freely available.

We now write to you to inform you, in your role as a contributor to the
Dspace codebase, of this of this exciting new development, and to thank
you once again for your contribution.  We hope that you will feel
inspired and encouraged to continue to contribute in the future to add
to the success of Dspace.

If you have questions or would like more information please contact  
contributor at dspace.org.

regards,

Nick Wainwright,  HP Labs
MacKenzie Smith, MIT
Michele Kimpton, DSpace Foundation

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