csound manual

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 02:11:39PM -0400, Felipe Sateler wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 14:01, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:

>> 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.

Well, I believe it was you who insisted on treating all contributors as 
copyright holders. ;-)

What makes sense to me is that we only deal with explicitly claimed 
copyright holders and their properly licensed code.  Yes, at least in 
the danish jurisdiction there is an implicit ownership as well, but what 
I suggest (and I believe that is the common approach in Debian) is to 
ignore implicit ownership - and if that means some of the code lack an 
owner who licensed the code to us then too bad: then we choose to not 
redistribute that piece of code.

...something along that I would expect you to get as response too 
if/when asking debian-legal at .


Problem here - if I understand you correctly - is that we have noone 
claiming to be a copyright holder generally for the CSound manual.

What makes most sense to me is actually to tell upstream that we cannot 
redistribute their manual without them explicitly stating a) who are the 
copyright holders (which might not be the same as those who wrote it - 
some contributors might have chosen to transfer ownership) and b) how 
each and every one of those copyright holders have licensed their 
contributions.


>> 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.

I believe that to be a false assumption.


  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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