On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 07:00:56PM +0200, W. Martin Borgert wrote: > Somehow Luk managed to make me say "OK, I'll collect the release > notes" for lenny. That's DebConf before the first coffee. At > this moment I was not aware of the license issue: There is > currently no license. The practical impact is probably small, > but I really want to solve the issue now. The bug report is open > for almost three years now. I talked also to Steve, who is one > of the main authors of the release notes and aware of the issue.
I was a release note editor for the last release only; my contributions are far less than those of many others on that list, it's not really fair to call me a "main" author... > I ask hereby - and in private mails following this one - all > authors of the release notes to place their contribution to the > release notes under the GNU General Public license (version 2 or > higher) by an GPG-signed e-mail to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] and/or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Many > thanks for your collaboration. Legally, there is no reason to require GPG-signed email; and there's no guarantee that everyone who has contributed to the notes has a GPG key at all. Please don't set the bar higher than necessary. In the bug log, you will see that several contributors have already agreed to GPLv2 as a license: myself, Osamu Aoki, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña (implicitly - because he was pushing the relicensing, we can assume he wasn't doing so in contradiction of his own licensing wishes). > If I cannot get positive answers within, hm, let's say three > weeks, from most main authors, I'll remove all text and start > the release notes from scratch :~( > Authors mentioned in the release notes: > Josip Rodin (joy) > Bob Hilliard (hilliard) > Adam Di Carlo (aph) > Anne Bezemer (is this [EMAIL PROTECTED] and/or > costar.at.panic.et.tudelft.nl?) > Rob Bradford (robster) > Frans Pop (fjp) > Andreas Barth (aba) > Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peñ(jfs) > Steve Langasek (vorlon) > The old CVS mentions further: > barbier (Denis Barbier) > djpig (Frank Lichtenheld) > ender (David Martínez > fbothamy (probably [EMAIL PROTECTED]) correct. > jseidel (Jens? Seidel) correct. > liling (Ling Li?) > pmachard (Pierre Machard) > spaillar (Simon Paillard?) > tale (Tapio Lehtonen) > xerakko (Miguel Gea Milvaques) > * What about translations? We start from scratch, but > translators can use their own translations and re-commit under > the terms of GPL. If we get license approval, I don't see any reason to start from scratch. > * What about other contributors? So far, I could not find other > contributor names in the logs (i.e. other than translations). > If you find or know something, please "follow-up". >From <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=332782#87>, we have these contributors not listed in your mail: - Daniel Nylander - Roberto C. Sánchez - Clytie Siddall - Frederik Schueler - Adeodato Simó - Nobuhiro IMAI - Luk Claes - Andrea Mennucci - Martin Michlmayr - Osamu Aoki - Jordà Polo I also promised, once upon a time, that I would run an analysis of the commit logs to try to get a list of other contributors. Fortunately the release notes are now available in svn, so I can use something better than 'cvs annotate' for this... :) I happened to use bzr-svn for the method shown below, but it should work equally well with svn instead. $ bzr branch svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/ddp/manuals/trunk/release-notes release-notes.trunk $ cd release-notes.trunk $ for file in $(find * -type f \( -name '*.sgml' -o -name '*.po' \)); do bzr annotate --all $file done | cut -f1 -d '|' | sort | uniq -d -c | sort -n > ../annotations $ This gets me a list of 590 commits, ordered by the number of affected lines. The first 103 of these affect 3 or fewer lines; I'm going to draw an arbitrary line there, and assert that any contribution with less than 3 remaining unaffected lines in the current version is probably not copyrightable. $ sed -i -n -e '/^[[:space:]]*4\b/,$p' ../annotations $ Now we can grab the list of significant committers to the current revision; there shouldn't be any surprises in this list: $ awk '{print $NF}' ../annotations |sort -u aba barbier ender fbotham fjp jfs joy jseidel liling pmachar robster tale vorlon xerakko $ And we can also grab the commit logs for each of these remaining 487 revisions of interest: $ awk '{print $2}' ../annotations | xargs -n1 bzr log -r \ | grep -v '^[^[:space:]]' > ../messages $ Visually postprocessing gets me the following list of contributors, some perhaps easier to contact than others. I've grouped them into major or minor contributors, based on the content of the commit logs; erring on the side of caution if it's ambiguous. I think we need to at least make an effort to get a sign-off from all these "major" contributors as part of a GPLv2 licensing, and if they can't be reached we should drop/replace their contributions. For the "minor" contributors, I think we'd be ok to leave their changes in if we can't reach them, and only remove them if they object to the license choice. FWIW, 1585 lines of the current release notes are traceable, unmodified, to joy's initial import in 2003 - I really don't know how to trace back any further without a *lot* of work, we should probably assume for now that the copyright on those contents is held by the people listed as release notes editors for pre-sarge... major contributions: Yooseong Yang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Mario Iseli TAKEI Nobumitsu Luca Brivio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Andre Luis Lopes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Nobuhiro IMAI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Clytie Siddall Holger Wansing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Stan Ioan-Eugen Eddy Petrişor Noritada Kobayashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Tetralet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Steinar H. Gunderson Daniel Nylander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Miroslav Kure <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Igor Tamara Osamu Aoki "Hero_xbd!.RRR" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Alexander Schmehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Nikolai Prokoschenko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Luk Claes Dan Damian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Andrea Mennucci Guillem Jover Antoni Bella Vincent McIntyre Minoru Nagahama Nabetaro (KURASAWA Nozomu) Maximilian Attems Miguel Figueiredo Felipe Augusto van de Wiel TAKEI Nobumitsu Adeodato Simó Martin Michlmayr Jordà Polo Ippei Tamura Yuri Kozlov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Juan Manuel García Molina Claus Hindsgaul <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Wojciech Zaręba <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Zhengpeng Hou Rui Pedro Roman Benko's <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Tommi Vainikainen minor contributions: Joost van Baal Simon Paillard KISE Hiroshi Stephane Blondon Nicolas Aupetit Marcello Nuccio Helge Kreutzmann "Max" (:P) Kazuhiro NISHIYAMA Charles Brockman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Olivier Trichet "Eric-m" (:P) Alberto Rodríguez Seiji Kaneko Santiago Vila Roberto C. Sánchez Leopold Palomo la Laida Hermann J. Beckers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Wouter Verhelst Martín Ferrari Kenshi Muto Cheers, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
