Re: Standard way to mention copyright holder in PO files

[Nicolas François <nekral.lists@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 08:54:08PM -0500, Ming Hua wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 04:19:15PM +0200, Nicolas François wrote:
> > 
> > I wonder if the copyright holders could not be specified in some header
> > fields. PO editors could update automatically the list of copyright
> > holders and dates.
> 
> I agree with the general idea of unified format for copyright
> informations, but I don't think using PO header fields as below will
> cover all situations.

I was willing to answer these questions (both technical and legal):
 * Who can be contacted when the last translator do not respond anymore?
 * Who has to be contacted if the translation must be relicensed?
 * Who holds the copyright of a PO file?

We can easily deal with the first 2 points.

> > I'm thinking about something like:
> > 
> > "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
> > "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
> > "Translator[0]: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR\n"
> > "Translator[1]: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR, YEAR\n"
> > "Translator[2]: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR, YEAR-YEAR\n"
> 
> What about the translations whose copyright is transfered to FSF (which
> is acutally quite common, either due to explicit request by FSF, such as
> all the TP translations, or due to careless translators just using the
> default header generated by gettext) or (in Debian's case) SPI?
> 
> What about some translators that don't want to hold copyright for
> his/her translation, but the team still want to credit his/her work by
> listing him/her as a translator?

We could differentiate
        Copyright (C) FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR
and
        FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR

It would be up to the PO editor to ask the translator, on a per file
basis, or based on an existing fake translator set to:
        Copyright (C) Free Software Foundation, Inc., YEAR
whether 'Copyright (C)' must be added.


Otherwise, we can also add a section in the header's comment whose format
would be standardized (in addition to the list of translators).
Something like:

####  COPYRIGHT  ##############################################################
##
## Copyright (C) YEAR COPYRIGHT HOLDER
## Copyright (C) YEAR COPYRIGHT HOLDER
##
###############################################################################

Kind Regards,
-- 
Nekral