Re: MaintainerDatabase Copyright

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

I do think people have their dander up a lot more than necessary on this
issue. I understand why you might have thought that the GPL was the wrong
license and there was the need for a change. The problem is that you bypassed
the consensus-building stage, and thus got people upset. I suggest you go back
to consensus-building immediately. To that end, I will contribute my opinion:

You will notice that FSF does not GPL the GPL. The license on it is:

	Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
	of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

There really are situations where this is warranted. In this case, the
copyright of the document should be held by SPI, and the submitters of
the individual records should assign those records to SPI. In turn, SPI
would contract to:

1. Give the people mentioned in the database the irrevocable right in
   perpetuity to order changes to their information as it appears in
   our master copy of the database, including complete removal of their
   record.
   
2. In the event of a dispute over the contents of a record, either party
   (SPI or the person mentioned in the record) has the right to request
   that the record in dispute be removed immediately from the master copy
   of the database, and that request must be honored.

3. SPI represents that it will distribute the database from the master
   copy when this is practical. However, SPI does not commit to maintain
   copies in an up-to-date state. Out-of-date copies may exist for many
   reasons, including the decision to not re-master CD images solely to
   update information contained in those images, etc.

I think that more license than this would be overkill. Comments?

	Thanks

	Bruce
-- 
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Bruce Perens K6BP   bruce@debian.org   NEW PHONE NUMBER: 510-620-3502


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