Re: Documentation License

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-04-26 at 22:28 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Matthew East <mdke ubuntu com> wrote:
>>
>> <snip discussion of dual-licensing; I can't speak to whether or not
>> docs will need to be completely rewritten or not>
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> This is not a bad idea; that said at the moment the Foundation doesn't
>> have much (read: any) infrastructure for this.
>
> IANAL (but Luis almost is), but I don't think you can
> "automatically" assign copyright.  Contributors would
> have to sign something and send it in.

I had missed the word 'automatically' in there. You're correct that a
'writing' or contract is required (though I believe that, at least
under US law, an actual physical 'writing' is no longer necessary) so
it probably could not be anything you or I would consider 'automatic'.
It could probably be fairly lightweight (and hence not much of a
discouragement to new contributors) but that would still require some
infrastructure that we don't have.

>  Just suggesting it would make no
> real difference, because the people who would bother
> are most likely regular contributors, i.e. people we
> don't have a hard time getting in touch with.

Right.

Luis