Re: PO file licensing

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Gurban,

Today at 12:09, Gurban M. Tewekgeli wrote:

> I have a question about licensing of PO files.
> We know GNOME is a GNU project and writing the line
> "Copyright (c) 2005  Free Software Foundation"
> in PO file jeaders is correct. 

That's actually *not* correct.  Not all GNU projects assign copyright
to FSF, and Gnome is one of those which don't.  While you might assign 
copyright on your translations to FSF, there's not much benefit in it
(unless everybody else does it), and you need to do it explicitely and
formally.

You should put copyright notices creditting anyone who actually did
the translation (though, technically, a translation is a derivative
work of the original, so original strings are copyrighted by software
author, and only translations are copyrighted by translators).

> But about non GNU
> projects can we apply this license to the PO file.

For all of the projects you need to use a *compatible* license, and
most likely, the same license (since you're asking this question in
the first place, you probably don't want to delve into the problems of
handling multiple licenses).  I.e. put a notice that says that your
translation is licensed under the same conditions as the original
software.

Cheers,
Danilo