Re: Overview of copyright issues

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Joseph Wakeling 
<address@hidden> writes
> Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:
> > ... which I'm sure will NOT hold up in court, so I propose we really 
> > end this
> > discussion. Please leave the lawyering to the lawyers and lets go back to
> > coding.
>
> Please understand the motivation for OPENING this discussion -- not to
> debate which license or what license, but to propose a few concrete
> things the LP coding team can do to clarify licensing and (perhaps) make
> it easier to upgrade the license if that's desired.

I'm very wary of the "or later" wording - I wouldn't want to push it on 
people. And there's a whole bunch of licences that are GPL-compatible 
that people might like to use.

I think that the guidelines should say "all new code must be licenced 
compatibly with v2 and v3. The preferred licence is 'v2 or later'".
> I particularly think it would be a good idea to make sure that all files
> in the source tree -- code and docs -- have both copyright and licensing
> statements in them.

Yup. And the contributors file should list the over-riding licence 
chosen by any contributor. That way, if Joe Bloggs licenced everything 
under v2, then asks you to put him down as licencing his code "v2 and 
v3", that change can be retroactive to ALL his code (there's no problem 
here because he's granting EXTRA rights). You probably want to put a 
copy of that email grant with the contributors file.
> More particularly, does anyone object to me adding a GFDL 1.1 or later
> notice to the doc files I have written?

It's your copyright, licence it as you wish (provided it's not 
incompatible with what's gone before).

One rider - please add the "with no invariant sections etc" wording so 
that it's compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. You are 
aware the GFDL as it stands is not recognised as a Free licence? I'm not 
sure where you'll find that wording - probably on the Debian website, 
and almost certainly if you search debian-legal.
> Best wishes,
>
>    -- Joe
Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden