Currently we have a patch file format that contains an author string (usually an email address) and the date when the patch was recorded.
Given a work (e.g. a file) within a Darcs repo, it is currently a pain in the arse to determine who the author and copyright holder of that work is, and how it is licensed. I had to do the same thing for an SVG file the other day, and I was reminded that SVG files created by Inkscape typically include RDF metadata. This (can) tell the readers unambiguously, in a machine-readable format, who the copyright holder is and how the file is licensed. This approach is also used by the Creative Commons. I'd like to propose (long term) adopting either RDF or some equivalent that allows end users to say on a per-patch file "I wrote this work, I have copyright on it, and I license you to use it per the following contract (e.g. GPL-2+)". There would be facility so that an end user can declare their preferred license, and a repository can declare its preferred license, and Darcs would warn the user if they were incompatible. For example, if I want to use CDDL for my works, but the Darcs repository is GPL-2'd, it would complain when I tried to do a "darcs record" unless I added to the command line --license gpl-2+ or whatever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
