On the heels of our Doc Leadership discussion about author attributions, I had
a follow-up conversation with Bonnie Corwin. Bonnie has worked quite a bit with
legal folks to figure ins-and-outs of open source, so she was able to bring few
facts to bear on our discussion. Here are my take-aways from that conversation:
- Sun writers do not get identified as authors, as their work belongs to
Sun, and the docs are a product of Sun.
- Community contributors who modify and re-distribute docs have some
standard paperwork to complete to identify the original source authors (e.g.,
Sun) and to identify their own additions. They can add their own copyright to
portions they've created.
- If Sun chooses to re-use community contributions (e.g., fold back into to
a Sun doc), any community contributor copyright needs to be reproduced in that
document.
This make sense? What questions are left unanswered? I'll be happy to try to
track down answers. In some cases, we may just want to establish our own
expectations/code of conduct about how we deal with community contributions in
Wikis and the like.
-alan
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