Re: Re-licenciamiento del sitio web [Fwd: Permission to relicense your Debian web site contributions]
On 13/02/2012, David Prévot <taffit@debian.org> wrote:
>> 2. If someone not previously worked on the website but want to
>> collaborate in the future is required to send the message? (the message
>> refers only to past collaborations, what about future collaborations?)
>
> As decided in #238245 [1] and stated in the license page [2], all new
> contributions are under the terms of GPL2+ or MIT since 25 January 2012.
> Everyone who contributes to the website does it under these licenses (no
> need to request any agreement: people who disagree with that are not
> expected to participate).
IMHO it would be best to have even *new* contributors to send that
email, just for the record. We (in the translation team) can do this
for new contributors so that they are aware of the licensing of the
website, it helps raise awareness.
>> 3. What happen with translations of which we do not know who was the
>> author? (we have some translations without the maintainer field in the
>> translation-check section).
>
> There are other ways to remember who was the author, like commit
> messages or mailing lists archives.
Unfortunately, this is not so true for some translation teams. The
Spanish translation team (IIRC the French, Japanese and German too)
started around 1998, before there was even a mailing list and
dedicated accounts for every translator.
> The goal of this first step is to gather as many copyright reassignments
> as we can. Hopefully, most contributors will be reached and will agree
> with the new licenses, and there won't be too much dark areas. Various
> ways are possible to handle problematic parts (e.g. try harder to find
> the author, rewrite, delete, make exceptions), but we'll discuss and
> propose a work flow later, once this first step will be completed, so
> we'll have a better idea of the “dark areas”.
I sent a few days back an e-mail to *all* the Spanish translators in
the 1998 to 1999 timeframe and I have received a large number of
e-mail delivery errors. I have not yet reviewed all of them but it
looks like *no* messages got through. Digging up updated contact
information for many of them will probably be an impossible task.
Translation teams, unlike the website team itself, fluctuate quite a
lot through time. Translation work is not a task that people join and
continue doing years later.
It is my opinion that we will be left with *many* past contributors in
translation teams which will not answer back and will not explicitly
provide permission.
IMHO, it would be appropiate to:
- send a message to debian-project and debian-announce indicating the
relicensing of the website
- post a News item in the website to indicate the license change
Maybe that will be picked up by some news sources (LWN, Slashdot, who
knos...) so that they are given wider disitribution.
This way, past contributors which are a) not reachable anymore or b)
not following the translation or web development mailing lists are
made aware of this change and can contact back if they do not agree
with the new licensing terms.
Best regards
Javier
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