On Sat, Mar 24, 2007 at 05:58:27PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > > Anyway, if a license change was properly announced beforehand contributors > > that feel that their rights are violated would have ample time to express > > their concerns. > > Are there really so many substantial contributors that it would be hard to > ask them all? Can't tell for sure. But digging the information can be really hard, the release notes have been written since 1999. > > This bug has changed into exactly the same type of discussion that prevents > > #388141 from being fixed any time soon, even though all the web pages have a > > footer that says "this text is copyright SPI" and no contributor has ever > > said that the copyright statement should be ammended to include *him*. > > Well, sorry, but that's a bug in the documentation team's process for not > proactively requiring copyright disclaimers. Well, I mean, you could argue > that it's a bug in copyright law, but we don't have the power to fix that > bug... You could say that the Release Notes were first in the "realm" of the boot-floppies team (in its CVS) and, actually, were outside the scope of the documentation team's. Hmm... Now that I think of it, one could say that since the Release Notes were originally part of the boot-floppies sources, and since the boot-floppies were fully under the GPL (or so does their debian/copyright file say) then the current Release Notes (derived work of that one) can only be under the GPL license. Right? I've just checked on archive.debian.org, slink's boot-floppies package sources available at http://archive.debian.org/dists/Debian-2.1/main/source/admin/boot-floppies_2.1.12.tar.gz advertise themselves as being under the GPL. The debian/copyright file is (more or less) unchanged in the different incarnations of the source. Even if the SGML file in itself does not carry the license (like b-f's install manual did, which got carried over to d-i's) FWIW, in slink the RN were translated to Spanish, Finnish, French, German, Czech, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian and Hungarian. So the GPL license would apply to those too (and to Catalonian and Danish) Regards Javier
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