Re: Fixing copyright notices on gnome.org websites

[Josh Triplett <josh joshtriplett org>]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 06:47:46PM +0100, Alexandre Franke wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 8:35 PM, Josh Triplett <josh joshtriplett org> wrote:
> > Unless the individual contributors working on the site have actually
> > legally assigned copyright to the GNOME Foundation, those contributors
> > likely retain their own individual copyrights.  (And I don't think we'd
> > want to require such an assignment.)
>
> That's a really good point.
>
> > It doesn't seem worthwhile to attempt to include a pile of individual
> > copyright notices on every page, but "© The GNOME Foundation" doesn't
> > seem quite accurate either.  Perhaps it'd make sense to just drop it
> > entirely?
>
> Those pages ace licensed under CC By. Dropping entirely the copyright
> notice would make it impossible to properly attribute the work when
> used under that license.

You could include appropriate attribution without making it a copyright
notice.

> However, I have since realized that the current notices say "The GNOME
> Project" and not "the GNOME Foundation". The latter is a clearly
> defined entity and leads to the assignment issues you mentionned. The
> former is a name for an informal collective, and I think that solves
> the issue you raised.
>
> Does that look good to you?

It might help to explicitly make the authorship credit something like
"contributors to the GNOME Project", to make it clear that the
attribution refers to many individual people.

I don't want to derail the attempt to clean this up, and I doubt any of
these approaches will lead to any serious practical issues.  I do see
many projects attempting to write things like "Copyright YYYY The Foo
Project Developers", which doesn't have any legal basis, and since the
question arose, it seemed appropriate to raise this issue.