Re: Documentation License

[Matthew East <mdke ubuntu com>]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 3:44 AM, 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.

Well, I'm a lawyer, but I don't think it's relevant: no one of us is
going to be an expert in copyright laws of all the possible countries
that Gnome contributors could be from. I think it's sufficient to take
a practical and reasonable view.

I think that it would be practical and reasonable to have a part of
the copyright notice that states that copyright is held by (e.g.) the
current members of the Gnome documentation team[1] and just to ensure
that new contributors are aware that part of submitting their work is
that the copyright is held by that group, and that when they leave the
group, the copyright remains in the group. No more, no less than will
be done for making contributors aware of the license that their work
is released under (we don't require a signature for that). I don't see
that as a barrier to contribution.

[1] I'm assuming this is a definable group with members listed somewhere

Anyway, maybe this is too complex, and maybe you don't envisage that
the license of the documentation is going to change again in the
future, in which case - no worries. The more important part of my
proposal was the suggestion that we could reuse existing material by
making efforts to contact contributors and obtain their approval to
the relicensing.

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