As usual I will be unable to attend the call. However I would appreciate it if the legal situation for the book is discussed. Until these are resolved I (and possibly others) are unable to contribute. We have agreed, as a community, what the licensing model is to be but we have not put any structure into place to ensure that we can accommodate that.
Summary of issues: a) licence on FLOSSManuals does not reflect licence agreed by community (and is a licence not recommended for text by its own authors http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals) b) copyright is being accredited to an individual (not enforceable in many parts of the EU) c) copyright is (to all intents and purposes) assigned to the chapter author rather than licenced by contributor as agreed here This is a ***blocker*** for me as a contributor. We have something like 50+ QAd articles ***already written*** and another 30+ written but not QAd. These resources span the majority of the proposed chapters and include supporting interviews and case studies. We publish around 15 new articles every year. I have scheduled half a day every week of our content editor (who is a professional content editor with 20 years experience) to work on integrating our work into the the book/ The book would be considerably further advanced if we were to resolve these issues. For my part I don't care who owns the copyright in the collective works, but I need to be able to show our lawyers that the work is adequately protected under British law, that is I need to show that I have only licenced our contributions to the book and thus I can continue to use our work in any way I desire. Having it licenced by to us is not sufficient for our legal team. We need to retain copyright in our own materials and we need that to be represented in the legal documentation. This means we need contributor licence agreements as does any such project. I have volunteered to manage this process on behalf of the community, but we need to get the process in place before it can be managed. As soon as we agree who the copyright will be assigned to I will have the CLA drawn up. Those who don't care and are happy to assign copyright to the copyright holder can just proceed - the rest of us will need to submit a CLA. I will handle the paperwork and, if necessary, I will provide the University of Oxford as the owner of the copyright - there will be no further paperwork required in this case as OSS Watch already has the necessary infrastructure set up. Please note, this is not a "will write" but a "have written", situation. Ross 2009/9/14 Chris Tyler <[email protected]>: > > Just a reminder that there's a TOS conference call Monday (Sept 14) at > 15:00 UTC (11:00 EDT). We need to discuss (and invest some energy in) > some of our initiatives to make them succeed. > > Call info including codes is at: > http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/TOS_Conference_Call > > Proposed agenda is at: > http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/TOS_Conference_Call/2009-09-14/Agenda > > -Chris > > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > [email protected] > http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos > -- Ross Gardler OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
