Website Copyright Licensing project
After talking with a few more people at DebConf and getting the input
of SPI that they'd really rather not have the copyright of more things
assigned to them, I'd like to propose the following:
For all contributors to the website, we require at least one of the
following license statements:
MIT/Expat: (with s/software/work/;)
Copyright <year> <name of author>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this work and associated files (the "Work"), to deal in the
Work without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Work, and to permit persons to whom the Work is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Work.
THE WORK IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
WORK OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE WORK.
GPL:
Copyright <year> <name of author>
This work is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
To achieve this, I (and hopefully a team of volunteers) will first
attempt to contact all current committers to the website and get a GPG
signed e-mail from them aggreeing to at least one of these licenses
for their contributions to the website. [I'll draft a form e-mail to
send out to contributors and send it here before starting, assuming
that everyone seems to be ok with the plan.]
We'll commit these contribution emails to
webwml/contributors/license_<accountname> and
webwml/contributors/license_supporter_<name/email> for authors who are
not committers but own copyright of stuff in the website. [This
location/style may be suboptimal; better suggestions appreciated.]
Soon, I (or someone else) will develop a tool to allow automatically
adding/updating a copyright/licensing stanza in the wml source file
before commiting, and implement a commit hook to verify that a
contributor has added a license statement before allowing the commit.
After we have started contacting the current contributors, we can try
to go after older contributors to secure their license statement, or
rewrite whatever bits are remaining if necessary.
Additionally, I suggest that we also remind contributors of the
following at the same time:
When you commit a change to the Debian web site, it is important that
either you are the author of the changes, or you have gotten the
author of the changes to license under at least one of the two
licenses we require. You should commit an e-mail from the author to
webwml/contributors/license_supporter_<name/email> verifying this fact
before (or at the same time) you commit the change.
Let me know if that makes any kind of sense; hopefully we can get
started on this soon.
Don Armstrong
--
Three little words. (In decending order of importance.)
I
love
you
-- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/graphics/batch35.php
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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