On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 05:00:16PM +0200, Pete Sergeant wrote: > > > although i don't want to take credit away from whomever's > > name is there, i also don't want them to get more credit > > than is their due. i'm quite willing to give up all of > > my rights to whatever i add so we don't fall into the > > morass of a copyright notice for every line. :) > > Hrm. Another idea about credit - we could assign individual entries of the > FAQ to authors, if recent. Then include something about the rest having > being written by whoever wrote it. > > Thoughts?
Giving credit for contributions is fine, but copyright really, _really_ matters, and must be held by a single entity. Today, Nate and Tom can probably agree about reasonable and unreasonable uses of the material that bears their copyright. But the situation could get unimaginably tangled if we start pinning copyrights on the FAQ for dozens of contributing authors. Examples ... * Someone dies: what is the situation when the executors of their estate start quibbling over their moral rights under the Berne convention? * Someone who has written a large section goes nuts, decides that ML is the One True Language, and insists on withdrawing their chunk/refusing to let anyone edit it/replacing it with a pro-ML rant. They've written the most lucid imaginable exposition of hash slices -- what do you do? * Then one of the authors signs a weasel-worded employment contract that appears to assign their work-for-hire to the employer, but which actually assigns _all_ their copyrights to the company, including previously written material. (No, I'm not making this up: I've had to quit a job because I was asked to sign such a contract.) What do you do if the new copyright owner asserts ownership and starts demanding a royalty? Now multiply these headaches by fifty-plus contributors and you can see what sort of mess the FAQ could get into if copyrights remain with the original authors. I think the FAQ should certainly acknowledge inputs and authorship. But it is ESSENTIAL to make sure that the copyright is centralized and held by some responsible body. Doesn't matter whether it's Yet Another Society, the Free Software Foundation, or the Tooth Fairy -- just as long as there's a central point of contact who can (a) receive copyrights from individual contributors, (b) grant permission for use of the work, and (c) won't start charging money for access at some future date. -- Charlie
