On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 21:17:22 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > The problem is that his work is now public domain, and we cannot claim > copyright in it. Also, in many jurisdictions he may maintain a right > to indications of authorship and the like even if he can dedicate all > his economic rights to the public domain.
Oh, thanks for setting me straight again. I'm embarrassed about my lack respect for the unknown; really ought to be dealing more responsibly with my cluelessness. The public domain impulse has been successfully beaten out of me and I know not to touch somebody's public domain declaration without their permission. For anybody that's still following this, these bullet points from <http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.html> may help Because precedent does not yet exist for a "public domain dedication" literally putting a work into the public domain (cause it to no longer have the quality of being ownable), the question is what effect a judge might rule it to have: * It might have no effect. * It might be ruled to create a global licence for unrestricted use. That licence might or might not then be adjudicated to be revocable by subsequent copyright owners (heirs, creditors). * It might be actually ruled to expunge property title, as intended. Moreover, each separate jurisdiction may decide the matter differently. Public domain to be treated as undefined, ad-hoc license declarations are out; and licenses from folks who know what they are doing are in. Sounds like a reasonable and easy to follow approach. > 1. Choose a single license recommended by somebody who knows what > they're talking about (OSI, FSF, and CC come to mind immediately), > and all contributors must agree to it. If the license is > copyleft, you need to decide up front how you want to deal with > licensing changes, and state that in the agreement. So that'd be GPLv2+ for source and MIT for tests. For the GPL, we also are keep track of some folks' preferences for license changes from the time I tried to make some progress on the OpenSSL exception. Should have been more shrewd about it <http://darcs.net/release/license_exceptions> by also asking if people were willing to assign copyright at the time. > 2. All contributors who wish to maintain copyright must insert a > copyright notice in their own name, with the date each > contribution was first published (eg, submitted to the mailing > list or pushed to the main repo). Is there a sensible way to deal with files that have no copyright assignment? Can we just leave them alone? Or can we retroactively insert a copyright header for all major authors listed in darcs changes? http://bugs.darcs.net/issue331 > 3. All contributors who wish to dedicate their contribution to the > public domain must insert a dated notice to that effect (with the > date of the PD dedication). > > # Copyright (C) 2010 The Darcs Team Ian has pointed out that we could perhaps use the SFC as that entity (I should check with them) # Copyright (C) 2010 Software Freedom Conservancy I'm guessing this sort of thing could also be useful if we were to start thinking about copyright transfer. I think the only reason I introduced this was uncertainty about what to do when there is no copyright declaration (be the test case public domain or not). For the public domain case, you suggested appending a statement to the existing declaration, which I think would end up looking like this # Public domain 2010 Petr Rockai # # This file is included as part of the Darcs test distribution, # which is licensed to you under the following terms: # # Permission is hereby granted <rest of MIT wording here>... PS: and along the way, I notice Karl Fogel recommends getting people to sign a contributor license agreement <http://producingoss.com/en/copyright-assignment.html>, seems like another rainy day TODO... -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> For a faster response, please try +44 (0)1273 64 2905.
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
_______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
