Re: Release Notes: license clarification
On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 07:00:56PM +0200, W. Martin Borgert wrote:
> Somehow Luk managed to make me say "OK, I'll collect the release
> notes" for lenny. That's DebConf before the first coffee. At
> this moment I was not aware of the license issue: There is
> currently no license. The practical impact is probably small,
> but I really want to solve the issue now. The bug report is open
> for almost three years now. I talked also to Steve, who is one
> of the main authors of the release notes and aware of the issue.
I was a release note editor for the last release only; my contributions are
far less than those of many others on that list, it's not really fair to
call me a "main" author...
> I ask hereby - and in private mails following this one - all
> authors of the release notes to place their contribution to the
> release notes under the GNU General Public license (version 2 or
> higher) by an GPG-signed e-mail to
> debian-doc@lists.debian.org and/or 332782@bugs.debian.org. Many
> thanks for your collaboration.
Legally, there is no reason to require GPG-signed email; and there's no
guarantee that everyone who has contributed to the notes has a GPG key at
all. Please don't set the bar higher than necessary.
In the bug log, you will see that several contributors have already agreed
to GPLv2 as a license: myself, Osamu Aoki, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
(implicitly - because he was pushing the relicensing, we can assume he
wasn't doing so in contradiction of his own licensing wishes).
> If I cannot get positive answers within, hm, let's say three
> weeks, from most main authors, I'll remove all text and start
> the release notes from scratch :~(
> Authors mentioned in the release notes:
> Josip Rodin (joy)
> Bob Hilliard (hilliard)
> Adam Di Carlo (aph)
> Anne Bezemer (is this J.A.Bezemer@opensourcepartners.nl and/or
> costar.at.panic.et.tudelft.nl?)
> Rob Bradford (robster)
> Frans Pop (fjp)
> Andreas Barth (aba)
> Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peñ(jfs)
> Steve Langasek (vorlon)
> The old CVS mentions further:
> barbier (Denis Barbier)
> djpig (Frank Lichtenheld)
> ender (David Martínez
> fbothamy (probably frederic.bothamy@free.fr)
correct.
> jseidel (Jens? Seidel)
correct.
> liling (Ling Li?)
> pmachard (Pierre Machard)
> spaillar (Simon Paillard?)
> tale (Tapio Lehtonen)
> xerakko (Miguel Gea Milvaques)
> * What about translations? We start from scratch, but
> translators can use their own translations and re-commit under
> the terms of GPL.
If we get license approval, I don't see any reason to start from scratch.
> * What about other contributors? So far, I could not find other
> contributor names in the logs (i.e. other than translations).
> If you find or know something, please "follow-up".
>From <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=332782#87>, we have
these contributors not listed in your mail:
- Daniel Nylander
- Roberto C. Sánchez
- Clytie Siddall
- Frederik Schueler
- Adeodato Simó
- Nobuhiro IMAI
- Luk Claes
- Andrea Mennucci
- Martin Michlmayr
- Osamu Aoki
- Jordà Polo
I also promised, once upon a time, that I would run an analysis of the
commit logs to try to get a list of other contributors. Fortunately the
release notes are now available in svn, so I can use something better than
'cvs annotate' for this... :) I happened to use bzr-svn for the method
shown below, but it should work equally well with svn instead.
$ bzr branch svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/ddp/manuals/trunk/release-notes release-notes.trunk
$ cd release-notes.trunk
$ for file in $(find * -type f \( -name '*.sgml' -o -name '*.po' \)); do
bzr annotate --all $file
done | cut -f1 -d '|' | sort | uniq -d -c | sort -n > ../annotations
$
This gets me a list of 590 commits, ordered by the number of affected lines.
The first 103 of these affect 3 or fewer lines; I'm going to draw an
arbitrary line there, and assert that any contribution with less than 3
remaining unaffected lines in the current version is probably not
copyrightable.
$ sed -i -n -e '/^[[:space:]]*4\b/,$p' ../annotations
$
Now we can grab the list of significant committers to the current revision;
there shouldn't be any surprises in this list:
$ awk '{print $NF}' ../annotations |sort -u
aba
barbier
ender
fbotham
fjp
jfs
joy
jseidel
liling
pmachar
robster
tale
vorlon
xerakko
$
And we can also grab the commit logs for each of these remaining 487
revisions of interest:
$ awk '{print $2}' ../annotations | xargs -n1 bzr log -r \
| grep -v '^[^[:space:]]' > ../messages
$
Visually postprocessing gets me the following list of contributors, some
perhaps easier to contact than others. I've grouped them into major or
minor contributors, based on the content of the commit logs; erring on the
side of caution if it's ambiguous.
I think we need to at least make an effort to get a sign-off from all these
"major" contributors as part of a GPLv2 licensing, and if they can't be
reached we should drop/replace their contributions. For the "minor"
contributors, I think we'd be ok to leave their changes in if we can't reach
them, and only remove them if they object to the license choice.
FWIW, 1585 lines of the current release notes are traceable, unmodified, to
joy's initial import in 2003 - I really don't know how to trace back any
further without a *lot* of work, we should probably assume for now that the
copyright on those contents is held by the people listed as release notes
editors for pre-sarge...
major contributions:
Yooseong Yang <yooseong@debian.org>
Mario Iseli
TAKEI Nobumitsu
Luca Brivio <lucab83@infinito.it>
Andre Luis Lopes <andrelop@debian.org>
Nobuhiro IMAI <nov@yo.rim.or.jp>
Clytie Siddall
Holger Wansing <h.wansing@onlinehome.de>
Stan Ioan-Eugen
Eddy Petrişor
Noritada Kobayashi <nori1@dolphin.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
Tetralet <tetralet@pchome.com.tw>
Steinar H. Gunderson
Daniel Nylander <info@danielnylander.se>
Miroslav Kure <kurem@upcase.inf.upol.cz>
Igor Tamara
Osamu Aoki
"Hero_xbd!.RRR" <heroxbd@163.com>
Alexander Schmehl <alexander@schmehl.info>
Nikolai Prokoschenko <nikolai@prokoschenko.de>
Luk Claes
Dan Damian <dand@level7.ro>
Andrea Mennucci
Guillem Jover
Antoni Bella
Vincent McIntyre
Minoru Nagahama
Nabetaro (KURASAWA Nozomu)
Maximilian Attems
Miguel Figueiredo
Felipe Augusto van de Wiel
TAKEI Nobumitsu
Adeodato Simó
Martin Michlmayr
Jordà Polo
Ippei Tamura
Yuri Kozlov <kozlov.y@gmail.com>
Juan Manuel García Molina
Claus Hindsgaul <claus_h@image.dk>
Wojciech Zaręba <wojtekz@comp.waw.pl>
Zhengpeng Hou
Rui Pedro
Roman Benko's <benco@acid.sk>
Tommi Vainikainen
minor contributions:
Joost van Baal
Simon Paillard
KISE Hiroshi
Stephane Blondon
Nicolas Aupetit
Marcello Nuccio
Helge Kreutzmann
"Max" (:P)
Kazuhiro NISHIYAMA
Charles Brockman <mr-chuck@att.net>
Olivier Trichet
"Eric-m" (:P)
Alberto Rodríguez
Seiji Kaneko
Santiago Vila
Roberto C. Sánchez
Leopold Palomo
la Laida
Hermann J. Beckers <hj.beckers@onlinehome.de>
Wouter Verhelst
Martín Ferrari
Kenshi Muto
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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