csound manual

[Felipe Sateler]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 14:57, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 02:11:39PM -0400, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 14:01, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>>
>> I have a list of commiters, and that list is contained in the list I have
>> in my local copy of debian/copyright. However, a large number of
>> contributions are made without commit access (for example, I might write to
>> the mailing list proposing some wording for a certain opcode). Some of them
>> have a "thanks to" note, but I think not all of them do.
>
> Well, I believe it was you who insisted on treating all contributors as
> copyright holders. ;-)
>
> What makes sense to me is that we only deal with explicitly claimed
> copyright holders and their properly licensed code.  Yes, at least in the
> danish jurisdiction there is an implicit ownership as well, but what I
> suggest (and I believe that is the common approach in Debian) is to ignore
> implicit ownership - and if that means some of the code lack an owner who
> licensed the code to us then too bad: then we choose to not redistribute
> that piece of code.
>
> ...something along that I would expect you to get as response too if/when
> asking debian-legal at .
>
>
> Problem here - if I understand you correctly - is that we have noone
> claiming to be a copyright holder generally for the CSound manual.
>
> What makes most sense to me is actually to tell upstream that we cannot
> redistribute their manual without them explicitly stating a) who are the
> copyright holders (which might not be the same as those who wrote it - some
> contributors might have chosen to transfer ownership) and b) how each and
> every one of those copyright holders have licensed their contributions.

If this was common practice in debian, we would be left without the
linux kernel.

>
>
>>> Do we have access to any documents upstream which supports the claim that
>>> all contributions have been made under the GFDL?
>>
>> I don't think so. However, if the code is released under a certain
>> license, and I contribute a patch, I think it is implicit that the code is
>> licensed under the same license as the project.
>
> I believe that to be a false assumption.

I believe common practice in debian has been to trust upstream when it
comes to licensing. We cannot provide a full auditory of the code's
licensing status, not without investing inordinate amounts of time and
effort, and possibly even money.

-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler