This is the second of a series of three IP-related blogs.  Yesterday I discussed the process of moving Projects into the Catalog.  Tomorrow will be about the GPL Catalogue.  And today some thoughts on the Lotus Awards.  

As you know, there are two Lotus Awards associated with OpenNTF – one for the Best Open Source Contribution by an Individual, the other for the Best Open Source Contribution by a Business Partner.  See here and here.




I would like to make a suggestion for those who are planning on submitting entries.  Do it early – or at least run a draft by me well before the deadline.

One of the conditions of the contest is that the application must be ready to post into the OpenNTF Catalog.  This means that the IP must be demonstrably clean.  So:
- you do need to ensure that all the authors are covered by an ICLA or CCLA;
- any code that you get from elsewhere, such as from other open source projects, is covered by a license that is compatible with the overall license of your project.

This may seem simple, but, as I mentioned in my last posting, we are finding code that authors have forgotten they used, and which may or may not have compatible licenses. So, by submitting early, you can have your code checked out – and have some time to fix any problems that we might find.  

Note that I am not a lawyer, and do not work for a legal firm.  The OpenNTF vetting only checks if submissions conform to OpenNTF standards – and should not be used as a guarantee of the absence of possible third party IP claims.  

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