Re: New wiki system: copyright

[Michael Heath]

It sounds OK, but do we need the ability to not assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation? 

If we really are going for the long term goal of including much of this in official documentation, it seems like leaving that option open functionally does very little for the user (the GFDL is very open), and will potentially create a problematic confusing web of who-owns-what in the future.

Other than that, it sounds fine.

On 8/29/07, Thomas Schwinge <address@hidden> wrote:

[This is sent to a number of mailing lists, as I think it's of general
interest, but please follow up on <address@hidden> (you don't need to
be subscribed) and people, generally, please keep everyone cced that is
in the cc list.]

[Richard, John: this is purely informational for you.]


Hello!

This is another email about the new wiki system I'm installing and where
I'd like to solicit your input

This time it's about the copyright of the user-contributed texts.


After some discussions with Richard M. Stallman and John Sullivan I can
tell you that the following is legally safe to do (who would have
expected that is's so easy about the copyright assignment...).

Each freshly create page will look like this, before you actually start
filling it with the intended content:

| [[license text="""
| Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
|
| Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the
| terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version
| published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no
| Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license is included
| in the section entitled [[GNU_Free_Documentation_License|/fdl.txt]].
|
| By contributing to any page on this wiki, you agree to assign copyright for
| your contribution to the Free Software Foundation.  The Free Software
| Foundation promises to always use either a verbatim copying license or a free
| documentation license when publishing your contribution.  We grant you back all
| your rights under copyright, including the rights to copy, modify, and
| redistribute your contributions.
| """]]
|
| HERE STARTS YOUR NEW CONTENT -- remove everything from there on, including this
| line.
|
| We put in the above copyright header so that we'll easily be able to include
| the text you contribute in official GNU documentation, such as GNU Hurd
| manuals, etc.
|
| If this is absolutely not what you want then you are free allowed -- after
| having spent some more thoughts on it -- to replace *Free Software Foundation,
| Inc.* with *The Contributing Authors* and remove the *By contributing [...]
| redistribute your contributions* paragraph.

Of course this can only be done automatically when using web-editing, but
the people using the rcs (i.e. Git) interface for creating new pages will
usually know what to do.

The license text will then be rendered by the wiki system to show up at
the bottom of the html pages, i.e. not at the top as it is done in the
above source file.


What are peoples' feeling about this licensing conditions?  Is it okay
this way or should we be doing differently?


Regards,
Thomas

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