On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 3:44 AM, Shaun McCance <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, 2009-04-26 at 22:28 -0400, Luis Villa wrote: >> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Matthew East <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> <snip discussion of dual-licensing; I can't speak to whether or not >> docs will need to be completely rewritten or not> >> >> > For the future I'd also suggest that contributors automatically assign >> > copyright in the material they produce to the members of a specific >> > and identifiable gnome-doc group or the Gnome Foundation to enable >> > copyright transitions to be smoother. >> >> This is not a bad idea; that said at the moment the Foundation doesn't >> have much (read: any) infrastructure for this. > > IANAL (but Luis almost is), but I don't think you can > "automatically" assign copyright. Contributors would > have to sign something and send it in.
Well, I'm a lawyer, but I don't think it's relevant: no one of us is going to be an expert in copyright laws of all the possible countries that Gnome contributors could be from. I think it's sufficient to take a practical and reasonable view. I think that it would be practical and reasonable to have a part of the copyright notice that states that copyright is held by (e.g.) the current members of the Gnome documentation team[1] and just to ensure that new contributors are aware that part of submitting their work is that the copyright is held by that group, and that when they leave the group, the copyright remains in the group. No more, no less than will be done for making contributors aware of the license that their work is released under (we don't require a signature for that). I don't see that as a barrier to contribution. [1] I'm assuming this is a definable group with members listed somewhere Anyway, maybe this is too complex, and maybe you don't envisage that the license of the documentation is going to change again in the future, in which case - no worries. The more important part of my proposal was the suggestion that we could reuse existing material by making efforts to contact contributors and obtain their approval to the relicensing. -- Matthew East http://www.mdke.org gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
