csound manual

[Felipe Sateler]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 14:01, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:18:26PM -0400, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>>
>> OK, this is a draft of what I'm going to put in debian/copyright.
>> Comments?
>>
>>  The csound manual has a long and complicated history. You can read it  in
>> the manual itself. That history makes it impossible to pinpoint  who did
>> what changes where, and thus make accurate copyright claims.  However, the
>> licensing of the work is not at risk. The manual history  has 2 main parts:
>> prior to 2003 and afterwards.
>>  Before 2003, both csound and the csound manual were developed at MIT,
>>  and they had a restrictive non-commercial license. The licensing  rights
>> were with MIT. However, in 2003 MIT released the manual under  the GFDL, and
>> placed in a CVS repository in Sourceforge. Since then,  all contributions
>> have been made through the csound mailing list and  cvs repository there.
>> Many contributors will not be listed here, but  all contributions have been
>> made under the GFDL.
>
>
> I believe it is more proper to say that "MIT were copyright holder"
> rather than "licensing rights were with MIT".
>
> If all parts from 2003 are now GFDL licensed, it seems irrelevant to me
> to clarify anything from back then.

So I could just start by saying the manual was released as GFDl by MIT
in 2003? Looks good to me :)

>
> 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.

>
> 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.


-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler