On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 01:03:19AM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote: > I agree that the GNU GPL v2 would be a perfectly reasonable choice for > the Debian website. > Several other GPLv2-compatible licenses are good choices too, however. I'd rather use a simpler license for text content it is more understandable and less subject to interpretation (note that embeded code in the wml files in the website *should* be GPL). Unlike other technical documentation (such as manuals or guides, see [0]) I don't think the GPL is a good license for the website. But maybe that's just me. > Out of curiousity, would you be willing to license your contributions > under "GPLv2 only"? > Or would you rather choose to license them under "GPLv2 or later"? I'd rather have it be "GPLv2 only". > > As long as the licenses used are compatible, we may not need a > > common license. Standard footers can be provided for inclusion for > > each page. > > That's a possible approach too. > It requires more care and is somewhat more complicated, though. Agreed. Nobody has brought up concerns about *other* licenses being used until we talked about changing the one we are *using* right now. Believe it or not, all the web pages have a footer saying that they are OPL and nobody has ever complained asking for different licenses for *their* contributions (not that I remember, at least). > > > d) new contributors during that period should be asked to agree to > > > the license change and to transfer (c) to SPI (GPG/PGP signed > > > e-mail would be a requisite for contributing, a paper trail would > > > be even best) > > > > What reason should people assign copyright if the license is > > free? I have no intention of doing so, for any past or future > > contributions. > > Agreed. In order to make it possible to do a license change in the future if needed be and not have the web team track every single individual that has contributed to the website (as is the case now). Even though we might end up choosing a license we *think* is the best right now, there might come a time we might want to change that. Maybe because it might turn out it was not really the best license for the web pages for X or Y reason. Having SPI hold the copyright simplifies things. The fact no one has complained about the fact the footer to their contributions to the web page says that all the pages are (c) SPI [1] made me think that nobody deeply cared about *their* copyrights to the webpages. It seems I was wrong. Regards Javier [0] See my proposal for the DDP at http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ddp-policy/ch-common.en.html#s2.2 [1] Notice that, again, Perl source code that generates parts of the web site is *not* (c) SPI.
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