Re: Documentation License

[Matthew East <mdke ubuntu com>]

Hi,

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> All of these things combined mean that the effort of doing
> new documents from scratch is minimal compared to what we'd
> need to do to build off of our current documentation.
>
> This means we can choose a new license.  Right now.
>
> Without crafting our own license (which I think we should
> avoid), we have three options:
>
> 1) Dual-license GFDL and CC-SA
> 2) Keep GFDL
> 3) Switch to CC-SA

I like the idea of dual-licensing, for an upstream project like this.

One point I would raise however is that I personally feel that it is
very unlikely that the documentation will be entirely rewritten from
scratch. I think that while the current material needs a lot of work,
and restructing, reuse of material is very likely to be helpful and
inevitable.

On that basis I'd suggest contacting previous contributors to get
permission for the change of license. I don't have a feel for whether
everyone will reply, but I think it's worth making the effort, and you
could even take a view that it's safe to assume that those who don't
reply will not enforce any rights to object to the relicensing. It's
at least worth a try, I think.

I guess translators would also be included within contributors.

For the future I'd also suggest that contributors automatically assign
copyright in the material they produce to the members of a specific
and identifiable gnome-doc group or the Gnome Foundation to enable
copyright transitions to be smoother.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF