Adrian Custer wrote: > Hey all, > > This is an attempt to clarify the situation for Geotools documentation > going forward. > > We apparently have two choices for the User Guide (aka Programmers' > Manual): > > 1) Add each contributor to the copyright list, holding the > copyright in common and license the whole document under the > FDL. > > 2) Assign copyright to the PMC or OSGeo and have them license > the document to the general public under the FDL. > > The main advantage of the latter is that it becomes possible for the > project to change its mind as to the details of the license, something > which may become important as the FDL comes to be better understood. > This second approach seems to be the one taken by the Developers Guide. > Here is the copyright statement from the Developers Guide: > > Copyright (c) 2004 Geotools Project Management Committee (PMC). > Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this > document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, > Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software > Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being with no Invariant > Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts being no Front-Cover Texts, > and with the Back-Cover Texts being no Back-Cover Texts. > > Given that the PMC is considered *not* to have sufficient legal standing > for code copyright assignment, I presume the same is true for the docs. > Will the OSGeo be able to receive copyright assignment for the docs? Is > there any particular proceedure we need to follow to assign this > copyright and to receive assignment from third parties?
Adrian, I would encourage having the same copyright holder for the documentation as for the source code for simplicity of management. While the PMC has questionable legal standing as a copyright holder, as long as the code is that way, perhaps the docs also ought to be. Is use of FDL Geotools policy for docs? I don't know a lot about document licenses, but the OSGeo board is using one of the creative commons licenses instead of FDL specifically because the FDL was seen as overly complicated and so it is hard to understand the issues. And this was Rich Steele, the lawyer who made the suggestion. PS. I do think the "PMC as copyright holder" issue again with Rich. I believe GRASS is in the same position of having a non-legal entity declared as holding the copyright. Best regards, -- ---------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
