csound manual

[Felipe Sateler]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 15:54, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 03:04:32PM -0400, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> No.  "common practice" means "what is most often done", not "what is always
> done".

Can you cite examples of "common practice"? I cited the linux kernel
because its the most obvious one.

>
> Oh, and I do not mean to say that upstream must explicitly list each and
> every copyright holder.  Some claim that "this team holds copyright, with
> this license."  I just meant (in that last sentence above) to cover the
> possible case of "ah, well, most files are licensed like this, so we simply
> assume that the rest are licensed similarly, even if the copyright holders
> are someone else).

Hmm, there is no explicit copyright claim... I'll see what upstream
says to that.

>
>
>>>>> 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.
>
> I agree.
>
> And I see no conflict between this and what I described above.  I suspect
> that you do, since you mention it here.  Care to elaborate?

If upstream tells me the work is GFDL'ed, then I have no reason to
believe some parts of it are not GFDL, unless explicitly stated. What
we are doing here is precisely debating whether the manual is in fact
GFDL.


-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler