Bug#388141: Handling the copyright mess of the website

[Tommi Vainikainen <tvainika@debian.org>]

David Prévot <david@tilapin.org> writes:
> I don't know what would be the best approach for future contributors
> (i.e. I don't know if we'll need to ask them explicitly for their
> consent, or if a page on our website would be enough), but for current
> and past contributors, we need their consent.
>
> We could contact every current contributor, and ask them if they are OK to:
> - grant copyright of their future contributions to SPI;
> - grant copyright of their past contributions to SPI.

I believe that copyright transfers are wrong path. Neither other
contributions to Debian project require copyright assignments and also
there does not seem to be consensus that copyright could be even
transferred without paper as in dead trees involved. Also, discussions
during many years in #388141 seems to indicate that not even all Debian
developers would be willing to assign copyright.

IMHO, your strategy works just fine if the request is instead only for a
license change. It can be a generic statement from authors such as any
future license change by Debian project leader decision or just giving
list of licenses as options.

Anyway this work can be started with by writing this
wml::debian::copyright tag, and start filling pages with that
information about authors. After there is list of authors, it is also
easier to request permissions to either license change or copyright
assignment. AFAIK, currently there isn't full list of all authors to
website.

Together with author information per page, I think we should add e.g.
copyright.txt to CVS root directory which contains information per
author, which relicensing are fine, or possible copyright transfer to
SPI.

-- 
Tommi Vainikainen