csound manual

Felipe Sateler fsateler at gmail.com
Wed Jun 30 16:18:26 UTC 2010


On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:02, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 11:24:11AM -0400, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 05:23, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 10:43:22PM -0400, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'm sorry if I'm being annoying with this thing, but I'm trying to
>>>> really understand the issue here.
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 20:49, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> We only have detailed copyright information for the few scripts we
>>>>>>>> already have documented. What do you propose to do? Expand the
>>>>>>>> Andres
>>>>>>>> Cabrera and others into the 35 or so names (and others)?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Whatever it is that you believe makes this package DFSG-free,
>>>>>>> document
>>>>>>> that.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Above you argue to me that the concrete names are not the important
>>>>>>> part, but the story is.  Do not explain to me, but to the world.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hmm. I believe you are confusing copyright assignment with
>>>>>> DFSG-freeness. The license is GFDL with no cover texts, so it is DFSG
>>>>>> free.
>>>>>> Copyright years and names are a different matter.
>>>>>
>>>>> They go together: Only the copyright holder can rightfully grant a
>>>>> license.  So if copyright holders are not properly accounted for,
>>>>> licensing
>>>>> is bogus!
>>>>
>>>> So your point is that, if we do not know exactly who wrote what, we need
>>>> to find out a way to make sure all contributors have made the software
>>>> available under the advertised license?
>>>
>>> Almost.
>>>
>>> If, as I understand from you, we are unable to get an explicit statement
>>> from upstream who is copyright holders of all parts of their distributed
>>> sources,
>>
>> This is true.
>>
>>> then we should do the second best of listing who it might be, and
>>> documenting why the information is vague - and we should then discuss
>>> with
>>> debian-legal at lists.debian.org if such info is acceptable.
>>
>> OK. I'll update debian/copyright with this info. It will be a brief
>> summary of the history page, and a list of all known contributors.
>
> Excellent.
>

OK, this is a draft of what I'm going to put in debian/copyright. Comments?

  The csound manual has a long and complicated history. You can read it in the
  manual itself. That history makes it impossible to pinpoint who did what
  changes where, and thus make accurate copyright claims. However, the
  licensing of the work is not at risk. The manual history has 2 main parts:
  prior to 2003 and afterwards.
  Before 2003, both csound and the csound manual were developed at MIT, and
  they had a restrictive non-commercial license. The licensing rights were with
  MIT. However, in 2003 MIT released the manual under the GFDL, and placed in
  a CVS repository in Sourceforge. Since then, all contributions have been made
  through the csound mailing list and cvs repository there. Many contributors
  will not be listed here, but all contributions have been made under the GFDL.


-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler



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