On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 13:35, Robinson Tryon <bishop.robin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If The PHP Doc Group believes that the CC-BY provides a framework
> under which a simple attribution line like that is sufficient, then I
> suggest they grease the wheels and calm the lawyers by clarifying it
> with an explicit, very permissive license like the New BSD or MIT.
I'm of the opinion that we should license all
machine-interpretable examples (i.e. - "code snippets") in both the
official documentation usage examples and user-submitted examples
alike - including those from the mailing lists and archives - under
either the MIT or New BSD license, so it was good to see someone else
mention those two explicitly. A simple ratification to the license
information pages would suffice. Exempli gratia:
"The PHP manual text and user-submitted comments are released
under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, Copyright (C) the
PHP Documentation Group, with the exception of machine code regions
(AKA - "code snippets") in the documentation or freely submitted by
the public, which is licensed under [MIT/NBSD]."
That said, in all technicality, anything presently in existence on
the site is licensed under the CC-BY license, plain and simple. It
would not be difficult to prove it in court, as there are literally
thousands of third-party points of reference as to what code was
present during the Attribution licensing. It's not an interpretable,
subjective case - it's black-and-white reality. Exhibit A existed at
Date-And-Time B, whereby it was legally restricted under License C.
One argument could exist, though, in the case that a user submits
a code snippet also licensed under the CC-BY license. This could
create a legal paradox: the code submission would be licensed under
the CC-BY attributed to the Docs Group, with dual required attribution
to the submitter. Only under this case, however, could it be true. A
user claiming release under a less-restrictive license would then be
overruled by the agreement during submission that it becomes the
property of the Docs Group, with the current license taking immediate
effect. Conversely, a more-restrictive license than any currently in
place would effectively nullify the validity of the submission (which
should force its removal), because any license of greater restriction
would explicitly disallow re-licensing by any party other than the
Intellectual Property (IP) holder. It is for this reason I remove any
and all notes mentioning licensure in any form. Further, because all
Copyright is transferred by agreement from the submitter - of his/her
own free accord - during the submission process, any claims to
Copyright of any submission or portion thereof is also removed
immediately upon discovery.
--
</Daniel P. Brown>
Network Infrastructure Manager
Documentation, Webmaster Teams
http://www.php.net/
