On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 14:15, Brandon Savage <bran...@brandonsavage.net> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 7:24 AM, Hannes Magnusson > <hannes.magnus...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:08, Robinson Tryon <bishop.robin...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> > It shouldn't take too long to fix this -- I'd just add a note in the >> > documentation section of the PHP license page along the lines of "All >> > example code in the PHP manual, including user notes, are additionally >> > available under the terms of the New BSD License," and then link to a >> > local copy of the New (i.e. the 3-clause) BSD License. >> >> >> The fix is easy, but it has many legal implications :) >> >> We also would have to update several other pages describing the manual >> pages, such as the add-notes page, and the license document in the >> manual itself. >> >> Also, who exactly is "The Documentation Group"? When we changed the >> manual license it was relatively obvious that we had to contact the >> authors listed on the frontpage, but who is in the group for the user >> notes and manual code examples? :( >> >> -Hannes > > All, > > I'm not 100% sure I believe we actually have an issue here. > > The manual as a whole is licensed under the CC-BY 3.0 license; that is, were > someone to duplicate a considerable amount of the manual verbatim, they > would be obligated to credit The Documentation Group as the > authors/maintainers of the documentation. > > However, use of small parts of the manual, or even whole code snippets, > would not rise to the level of copyright infringement if the author refused > to attribute those snippets to The Documentation Group. In fact, I would > argue that this use would fall under the Fair Use doctrine in many cases. > > The fact that authors of notes are made explicitly aware of the fact that > their notes become available as a part of the PHP manual, and that they > intentionally surrender their intellectual property rights as a part of > their submission, says to me that the practical effect of the license and > enforcement thereof becomes our responsibility. > > All of this has been a long route to saying the following: anyone who uses a > small piece of a code snippet, changing it or not for their own needs, does > not necessarily rise to the level of infringing upon the copyright of the > snippet's owner(s) simply by doing so, and thus doesn't necessarily obligate > them to credit the author under the Creative Commons license. While > wholesale duplication of the manual and its contents without attribution > would be a clear violation, minor, inconsequential use does not necessarily > qualify. >
The "snippet's owner(s)" is the PHP Documentation Group. The CC-BY license has this explicit notice (in human readable terms): "Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)" It doesn't say "if you use significant amount" or anything along those lines. Whenever, whatever, you copy, distribute, share, or adapt anything from the manual or its notes you have to attribute that work. As for the manual text itself, that attribution note was intentional choice by us when we changed the license couple of hours ago. As for the side affect it had on the user contributed code snippets and examples in the manual, that point was never realized until now (at least not on my part). I personal have no problem with sticking to that clause when copying snippets from that manual, and have done so in the past (just because thats something I always do), but if CC-BY is incompatible with GPL.. then those hillbillies have a problem using the examples. The question then becomes: Should we ignore the GPL weirdos, or should we help them out by dual licensing code snippets and examples under BSD? If yes, who actually is the authority here? The listed manual authors? -Hannes
