Hi! The PHP Documentation license change is in the air for a long time, but actual movement was not made to change the license, we've just talked about it... I would like to ask every guy adressed personnaly (all the officialy listed manual authors) to reply to this letter and express their opinions on the license change. The authors need to agree on the new license (or that the current one is ok, if this turns out).
This text is a mixed version of Hartmut's previous proposal and the March phpdoc meeting findings. As said in the meeting protocol, we can only offer suggestions here, the actual decisions have to be taken by the current copyright holders. Of these only Egon took part in this meeting. ..........: What's the problem? :.................................. The current phpdoc repository is licensed under the GPL and "copyright holders are the members of the PHP Documentation Group as listed on the manual front page". As the GPL focuses on code and not on documentation content it is not really the right choice for protecting the manual. We need to have one documentation specific license for the text and probably a different one for the build system. ..........: License goals :........................................ Whatever the new license will be, it has to make sure that copyright is kept intact and that nobody but the copyright holders may change the license, neither in original nor in modified form and that the original authors and contributors get the credits they deserve. It has not become clear whether commercial distribution should be possible or not. ..........: Some possible licences to choose from :................ The FreeBSD Documentation License The FreeBSD Documentation License is very much like the modified BSD license. It does not restrict redistribution and/or modification at all as long as the license and copyright notice is kept intact. The Open Content License The Open Content License allows modifications as long as the license and copyright are kept intact and modified versions are clearly marked as such, but it does not permit charging for the distribution of the content itself, you may only charge for media and for additional services you provide related to the content. The Open Publishing License The Open Publishing License (not to be confused with the Open Content License) goes more into the details of publishing and defines fair use of content. It does, for example, require that the original authors have to be printed on the cover if the content is published in book form. The original license is rather liberal regarding modifications and commercial publishing, but there are two license options that can be added to deny substantial modifications or commercial publishing without special permission. The GNU Free Documentation License This License goes even more into detail as it was the only one of those presented here that was created with the help of professional lawyers. It tries to define the details of fair use similar to the Open Publishing License, but with a slightly different focus. It does not prevent modifications or commercial distribution as long as copyright and license are kept intact and modifications are made available in source form. ..........: March PHPDoc meeting findings :........................ We discussed the licensing issues at the phpdoc meeting this March. We compared these open documentation licenses and found that the OPL including options A and B fits us best (http://opencontent.org/openpub/). We don't want to be very restrictive regarding option B, so we'll publish a "permission granting policy" that will make our decision process regarding 3rd party publishing transparent. The Zend documentation license had great influence on this decision. One thing we still have to check is whether the OPL including both options is compatible with the debian guidelines, we want to make sure we are in compliance to them. Another thing is that option B seems to especially refer to printed material and not other forms of publications like eBooks, we would like to have general protection here instead of paper-only restrictions. And finally we have to check the license and our goals against US and (at least) European copyright law. Regarding the manual infrastructure and tools (configure, makefile, stylesheet customizations, scripts ...) we suggest to put them under the PHP License for consistancy reasons. (We might even consider creating a seperate project for them as they are usable for other documentation projects and PHP-GTK and SRM already do so). For the future we'd suggest that each substantial contributor keeps the copyright to his contributions (espec. important for extension documentation) while we elect a small group of two or three people that are in charge of copyright related issues like dealing with option B related requests (copyright & license bitches). We also discussed at the meeting that we'd like to extend the list of people mentioned in the manual. The position of names on the list should not only be defined by historical reasons but also reflect the amount of work put into the project by current contributors. We do not want to degrade the work done by the founders of this project, but give the newer contributors a fair share of fame, blame and shame ;) It's actually nonsense, that even Hartmut is not listed as an author, while he added many parts to contents, and has done a great job on the build system... A system need to be invented on how to add new entries to the authors list, currently there are no rules for that. ..........: SO, what to do now? :.................................. I would like to ask all the authors (Stig Sæther Bakken, Alexander Aulbach, Egon Schmid, Jim Winstead, Lars Torben Wilson, Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrei Zmievski, Jouni Ahto) all adressed personnaly with this letter to add their opinions and thoughts about the license change, crediting of contributors, commercial distribution of the manual, compliance with other laws, etc. Then the decision is up to you the copyright holders to change. Goba -- PHP Documentation Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
