[Gimp-developer] Licensing documentation and re-licensing GIMP data

[Jehan Pagès <jehan marmottard gmail com>]

Hi all,

We were just discussing with Patrick David that there is a bunch of
tutorials with copyright but no licensing information on the gimp-web
repository. So that makes them impossible to touch.

Since that's a lot of very old tutorials anyway and outdated for many,
he is cleaning out a lot of these. I proposed that once we have only
new documentation, we add a COPYING file in the repository root with
an appropriate license (CC by-sa for instance?), because the repo has
no such file right now, so that all future contributions should be
considered free documentation, still with authorship, but at least
really modifiable and distributable.

Another way would be to contact all contributors of current data, but
Patrick David tells me that he plans to remove and replace a lot of
doc anyway, so that's probably unnecessary for the time being. Also
there are apparently past contributors we might not want to contact.

For information, we can get the list of all contributors with `git
shortlog -s` (I count 43 names right now, but if we remove duplicate
(name bugs), and all current contributors, that makes maybe not even
20 names of old contributors, I think.
With this command, we can even get a formatted list, ready for
emailing (then we can do some manual filtering out if needed):
$ git shortlog -s -e | tr "\\n" "," |sed -r 's/\s*[0-9]+\s*/ /g'

We can even get the list of names with actual current contents (number
of lines) by using git-blame:
$ git ls-tree --name-only -z -r HEAD | xargs -0 -n1 git blame
--line-porcelain | grep "^author " | sort | uniq -c

Anyway, that's *if* we need to contact anyone. :-)

Schumaml also proposed that we could relicense GIMP data (brushes,
patterms, etc.) as well and place a more appropriate license for the
data. This could pertain to both the data/ directory of the main gimp
repository (36 names only with `git shortlog -s data/ |wc -l`), and
the whole gimp-data-extras (only 11 names!) all together.
Currently the main GIMP data is GPLv3+ and the data-extras has a GPLv2+ license.

Has there any thoughts about this? Could we go with a CC  by-sa for
all documentation and all data?
For my own, I am obviously ok with such a licensing of the commits I
may do in these parts of the project. :-)

Jehan