Re: Copyright/licensing action plan + a sample [PATCH]

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 01:08:34AM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
> The main aim is not relicensing but just to try and get a handle on who
> wrote what parts of Lilypond.

As long as we know who contributed to lilypond (that's a separate
question), knowing exactly "who wrote what" is only useful if we
want to change the license, but cannot get permission from
everybody.  (i.e. so we know what we need to rewrite)

Earlier, you wrote something like "get a bit of work done now, so
that there's no great loss of effort".  I think you should drop
the per-file thing, and just add the licenses and pointers to
licenses in non-main files.

There's a *ton* of other janitorial work to be done, especially by
people who have proven that they're willing to do work (about 50%
of people who say "hey, I want to help out" never do anything!).
And not only that, but you're capable of using git!  There's lots
of stuff that needs doing for the new website, for example.


If you really want to keep on doing copyright stuff, then I'd
suggest that you look into the licenses of the projects which
lilypond *links* to.  Stuff like ghostscript doesn't matter, since
we only call it on the command-line.  But it would be good to
know, for example, what license guile 1.8 is under, if they
changed to GPLv3 when did it happen, etc.

I'm pretty certain that we're fine right now, but as more and more
projects switch to GPLv3, we might suddenly discoved that we can't
link to pango or freetype or something like that.  It would be
great if we had a list of such projects, so that if/when we
seriously discover any license switch (again, in a few months) we
have that info handy.


> I'm then entering these details into a Google Docs spreadsheet (which
> I'll share with anyone who requests it).  The same spreadsheet also
> contains a complete list of contributors (from Francisco's .mailmap) and
> a note on whether they support switching the license to GPLv2+ and
> whether they are willing to dual-license doc contributions as GPLv2+.

There's no dual-licensing of doc contributions.  Docs are
currently FDL 1.1 or later (sigh).  Code is GPLv2.  Exceptions to
this (such as cary.ly) should be remedied.

To put it formally: if a contributor has offered some
documentation under either FDL 1.1 or GPLv2, then we accept the
FDL 1.1 version and do not accept the GPLv2 version.

Cheers,
- Graham