csound manual

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:18:26PM -0400, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>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.


I believe it is more proper to say that "MIT were copyright holder"
rather than "licensing rights were with MIT".

If all parts from 2003 are now GFDL licensed, it seems irrelevant to me
to clarify anything from back then.

If all contributions not originating from MIT have been tracked using
CVS at SourceForge, it should be possible to get a list of account names
from there, to at least know how many unknown contributors we are
talking about.  If this is a large task, it might make sense to first
ask debian-devel if such info is legally relevant or not.

Do we have access to any documents upstream which supports the claim
that all contributions have been made under the GFDL?


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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