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

[Joseph Wakeling]

Graham Percival wrote:
> 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.

OK.  I have not been following those discussions closely but if you can
give me a rough todo list I will see what I can contribute in that
respect and prioritise it over any copyright work.

I also have to get back to the contemporary music documentation, which
I've been neglecting ...

> 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.

Yes, I think that's a good idea and will start tracking those things.

Guile I think is LGPLv3 although parts may be GPL -- but that's only for
the current development release (i.e. 1.9.x).  1.8.x is still under LGPLv2+.

> 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.

That was one of the motivations for tracking who was OK with GPLv2+ --
to have an advance list of people ready for such an eventuality.

> 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.

Just tracking willingness, rather than proposing a change.  It seemed
worthwhile to see who would sign up for the Debian maintainer's proposal
of dual-licensing the docs.

On the broader scheme of things I'm going to keep tracing the
contributors to individual files (but not with incredible speed).
Besides any usefulness for Lilypond I have a vested interest which has
nothing to do with Lilypond or licensing per se, but relates to a
project that stems from my day job:
http://project.liquidpub.org/
http://github.com/WebDrake/liquidpub-dvcs
https://code.launchpad.net/~webdrake/liquidpub/peer-review

... so learning about tracing/tracking contributions and contributors in
a version control system is interesting to me anyway, and since it's
unlikely to HURT Lilypond and might be of some use, I might as well
follow that interest ... :-)

Best wishes,

    -- Joe