Follow-up Comment #30, task #14528 (project administration): >> Does this mean that we have to wait ~4 months for any progress on this task? > > Strictly speaking, you don't have: you could make sure that Savannah hosting requirements (for example, the documentation should be released in a FDL1.3+-compatible way) are met by then (i.e. June).
As far as I was aware, that is what we have always strived to do: * The webpages are FDLv1.3+ (see the footnotes). I have just made this clearer <https://sourceforge.net/p/nmr-relax/website/ci/349b481cf7577490894e8758648f60df439b3d5a/> though. * The API documentation <http://www.nmr-relax.com/api/4.0/> is GPLv3+, matching the source code as expected (it is 100% auto-generated from the source code). * The PDF manual <https://sourceforge.net/projects/nmr-relax/files/manual/relax.pdf/download> and auto-converted HTML manual <http://www.nmr-relax.com/manual/index.html> are GPLv3+ licensed. These contain lots of source code fragments, full scripts, UI screenshots, documentation auto-generated from the code (215 pages from 712), and a huge number of non-copyrightable mathematical equations. Using the GPLv3+ was determined to be far less complicated than having a FDLed document interspersed with a huge number of GPLed text, graphic, and data components. So we chose licensing simplicity for legal clarity. > Scripts are nice, but they rarely catch things like licensing inconsistency The relax project was started in 2001 with an aim of adhering to all of Richard Stallman and the FSF goals to be truly free software. That is why we chose Gna! hosting originally (see this discussion about the Affero licence <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2004-04/msg00096.html>). Any licensing inconsistencies will be due to honest mistakes. With such an old project written by scientists (i.e. non-programmers) for scientists, and including a large quantity of data files for complete test coverage, some issues might creep in. But I have tried to be vigilant and have caught and fixed most of these issues as they are committed. The script I wrote was to help find any inconsistencies (but not all). As many other GPLv3+ licensed projects do, we also did not attach copyright notices to non-source-code files (data and graphics). This is under the assumption that those copying any source or content would look at the repository(s) to obtain that information (otherwise they would not have a legal licence for their distributed copy). We have changed that policy now so that all files have a copyright notice, and the script is a useful tool for identifying those with missing notices. The script will also be very useful for automated checking in the future in case other developers do not meet the FSF licensing standards. The developer can run the script themselves to see the issue. > (e.g. what license actually applies to graphics/oxygen_icons? GPL? LGPL? may you really relicense it under GPLv3 "or later"?; The authors listed in the AUTHORS file <https://sourceforge.net/p/nmr-relax/code/ci/master/tree/graphics/oxygen_icons/AUTHORS> originally licensed the graphics under the LGPLv3+ <https://sourceforge.net/p/nmr-relax/code/ci/master/tree/graphics/oxygen_icons/COPYING>. They use the text "or (at your option) any later version" in their COPYING file. The original AUTHORS and COPYING file have been placed into the graphics/oxygen_icons/ directory. We originally just had the LGPLv3 licence text in the graphics/oxygen_icons/COPYING file, rather than their "annotated" version. The new README files contained a cut and paste error that is now fixed <https://sourceforge.net/p/nmr-relax/code/ci/03a0010c46591003e2b39832ba9e01670a1ae665> (the copied GPL notice should have been modified to be LGPL). >and public domain files should also have notices saying who was the original copyright holder; This is the case for all the public domain content except for PDB (Protein Data Bank) 3D protein structures <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Data_Bank>. For the structures listed in test_suite/shared_data/structures/README and elsewhere as being public domain, it is impossible to determine the "original copyright holder". The PDB file lists all authors on the scientific paper. However the "original copyright holder" is only one of those authors and that author is not identified. See the "AUTHOR" and "JRNL AUTH" entries in these files for the author lists. The "AUTHOR" entry is sometimes the "original copyright holder", sometimes the professor who does not have copyright ownership rather than their student who created the file, and sometimes all of the authors on the publication. Upon submission of a 3D structure to the PDB, the "original copyright holder" accepts to release the work as public domain. Therefore there is no legal question about the copyright-free status of the contents in the Protein Data Bank. > and why opening SVG files in an editor like Inkscape shows that they have a proprietary license, This new Inkscape "feature" of listing the licence, which I've only just found out about, did not exist when these graphics were created. It seems to default to "proprietary" in the Inkspace application for any SVG without <cc:license/> tags. But that does not make our vector graphics "proprietary". Should we be adding "Creative Commons" tags to our SVG files just for the benefit of the current version of the Inkscape application? This is not even used by the Creative Commons organisation themselves (see https://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/logos/cc.logo.svg). > and why normally reading DVI and PDF files people don't see the notices) and one has to figure out why files like graphics/oxygen_icons/AUTHORS are missed. I'm not sure what this means? Should the GPLv3+ licensing of the PDF and HTML manual be better advertised? If so, I have just added a second title page with this info <https://sourceforge.net/p/nmr-relax/code/ci/a8f54acde1d44511238d9c56a2edc64ab33425c1/>. It adds the following text to the bottom of page 2: """ Copyright (C) 2001-2018 the relax development team Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. """ For graphics/oxygen_icons/AUTHORS, this simply a list of authors. Does it require a copyright notice? I thought this type of content is not copyrightable. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14528> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
