Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
Hi everyone, It's been about a week since I emailed-out information I'd received from the lawyers about dual-licensing code examples. To date I've received no responses, so I'm going to be a cheerful optimist here and hope that people are generally happy with the text as written. I'd like to keep the ball rolling on this, so please let me know if you have any comments or questions. A copy of my email from the 26th including the information from the lawyers is quoted below. Thanks, -- Robinson On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Robinson Tryon bishop.robin...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Robinson Tryon bishop.robin...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Philip Olson phi...@roshambo.org wrote: I avoid the topic of licenses whenever possible but let's make a decision. It feels like most would prefer dual licensing for code snippets (despite GPL and PHP not getting along all that well, ever) so let's do that. Does someone here have a lawyer friend who will look over the proposed change? Sure, I'm happy to take point on that. I'll pass along the information from this thread and let the list know as soon as I hear something back from the lawyers. Hi guys, I've heard back from the lawyers and received some very helpful information about dual-licensing the documentation and dealing with copyright assignment. (General disclaimer: IANAL, and this advice should be construed as nothing more than my advice) Based on my conversations, here's a licensing paragraph that can be used on the PHP licensing page (and on individual pages of the manual, if desired): The PHP manual is Copyright (C) the PHP Documentation Group, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. All example code in the documentation or freely submitted by the public in user notes is additionally licensed under the New BSD License. Regarding copyright assignment, it appears that the law is quite strict about the matter, requiring actual signatures from individuals to complete the transfer. That kind of requirement seems like enough hassle than it might discourage people from contributing user notes, which is definitely something that we all want to avoid. But don't get discouraged yet! Based on what I've heard from the lawyers, we don't necessarily need copyright assignment to include user notes in the manual. Instead of requiring assignment, we can just require a license from the individual to the PHP Documentation Group. Here's a draft of how the ToS could read: To improve the PHP Manual, information from user notes may be periodically incorporated into the primary documentation. By submitting a user note you attest that all contributions are your own and grant the PHP Documentation Group a license to use the content of the user note in the documentation under the same terms as the primary documentation, as well as the right to re-license the content should the license of the PHP Manual change. Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. See the Licensing Page for details. On a related note, is there any further clarification about who comprises The PHP Documentation Group ? It might be helpful to get that sorted out at the same time as the dual-licensing of the documentation, particularly as the documentation license specifically refers to the Group, and they appear to hold the role of shepherds of the manual, user notes, and license. Cheers, -- Robinson
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Robinson Tryon bishop.robin...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Philip Olson phi...@roshambo.org wrote: I avoid the topic of licenses whenever possible but let's make a decision. It feels like most would prefer dual licensing for code snippets (despite GPL and PHP not getting along all that well, ever) so let's do that. Does someone here have a lawyer friend who will look over the proposed change? Sure, I'm happy to take point on that. I'll pass along the information from this thread and let the list know as soon as I hear something back from the lawyers. Hi guys, I've heard back from the lawyers and received some very helpful information about dual-licensing the documentation and dealing with copyright assignment. (General disclaimer: IANAL, and this advice should be construed as nothing more than my advice) Based on my conversations, here's a licensing paragraph that can be used on the PHP licensing page (and on individual pages of the manual, if desired): The PHP manual is Copyright (C) the PHP Documentation Group, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. All example code in the documentation or freely submitted by the public in user notes is additionally licensed under the New BSD License. Regarding copyright assignment, it appears that the law is quite strict about the matter, requiring actual signatures from individuals to complete the transfer. That kind of requirement seems like enough hassle than it might discourage people from contributing user notes, which is definitely something that we all want to avoid. But don't get discouraged yet! Based on what I've heard from the lawyers, we don't necessarily need copyright assignment to include user notes in the manual. Instead of requiring assignment, we can just require a license from the individual to the PHP Documentation Group. Here's a draft of how the ToS could read: To improve the PHP Manual, information from user notes may be periodically incorporated into the primary documentation. By submitting a user note you attest that all contributions are your own and grant the PHP Documentation Group a license to use the content of the user note in the documentation under the same terms as the primary documentation, as well as the right to re-license the content should the license of the PHP Manual change. Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. See the Licensing Page for details. On a related note, is there any further clarification about who comprises The PHP Documentation Group ? It might be helpful to get that sorted out at the same time as the dual-licensing of the documentation, particularly as the documentation license specifically refers to the Group, and they appear to hold the role of shepherds of the manual, user notes, and license. Cheers, -- Robinson
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On 10/11/2010 01:07 PM, Philip Olson wrote: On Oct 4, 2010, at 12:41 PM, Robinson Tryon wrote: On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Daniel Browndanbr...@php.net wrote: 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]. As suggested in the DFSG FAQ, I think that a dual-licensing scheme would provide the most clarity and flexibility for the code embedded in the documentation. (I'd also suggest putting the copyright notice before the license name, otherwise it's unclear whether it is the manual or the CC license that is copyright by the PHP Doc Group!) To riff off of your example: The PHP manual is Copyright (C) the PHP Documentation Group, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The machine code regions (AKA - code snippets) in the documentation or freely submitted by the public, are also licensed under the [MIT/NBSD]. I'm sure that there's a good way to tighten up the language about the example code/code snippets a bit. I'm sure we could find a lawyer or two to review the text, if it would be helpful. snip I avoid the topic of licenses whenever possible but let's make a decision. It feels like most would prefer dual licensing for code snippets (despite GPL and PHP not getting along all that well, ever) so let's do that. Does someone here have a lawyer friend who will look over the proposed change? Regards, Philip I wwould NOT like to see dual licensing. Aside from any likely legal issues it introduces unwarranted complexity with existing and new documentation. Chris -- Email: christopher.jo...@oracle.com Tel: +1 650 506 8630 Blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Christopher Jones
christopher.jo...@oracle.com wrote:
I wwould NOT like to see dual licensing. Aside from any likely
legal issues
I think we're all interested in any potential legal issues that
licensing changes could bring. What additional legal issues would dual
(disjunctive) licensing pose ?
it introduces unwarranted complexity with existing
and new documentation.
Based on what I've read in previous emails in this thread, the
copyright of the manual and of all user-contributed code resets with a
single entity. If we take that as fact, then I see no legal hurdle to
us treating new and existing documentation separately.
Moving from a single license to a dual-licensing model does introduce
a small amount of complexity ('you may choose license A or B', instead
of just 'license A'), but I think that the overall benefits
(supporting code reuse, eschewing legal ambiguity, community
education, etc...) more than outweigh the addition of a tiny amount of
complexity to the license declaration.
--R
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Oct 4, 2010, at 12:41 PM, Robinson Tryon wrote: On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Daniel Brown danbr...@php.net wrote: 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]. As suggested in the DFSG FAQ, I think that a dual-licensing scheme would provide the most clarity and flexibility for the code embedded in the documentation. (I'd also suggest putting the copyright notice before the license name, otherwise it's unclear whether it is the manual or the CC license that is copyright by the PHP Doc Group!) To riff off of your example: The PHP manual is Copyright (C) the PHP Documentation Group, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The machine code regions (AKA - code snippets) in the documentation or freely submitted by the public, are also licensed under the [MIT/NBSD]. I'm sure that there's a good way to tighten up the language about the example code/code snippets a bit. I'm sure we could find a lawyer or two to review the text, if it would be helpful. snip I avoid the topic of licenses whenever possible but let's make a decision. It feels like most would prefer dual licensing for code snippets (despite GPL and PHP not getting along all that well, ever) so let's do that. Does someone here have a lawyer friend who will look over the proposed change? Regards, Philip
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Philip Olson phi...@roshambo.org wrote: I avoid the topic of licenses whenever possible but let's make a decision. It feels like most would prefer dual licensing for code snippets (despite GPL and PHP not getting along all that well, ever) so let's do that. Okay. Does someone here have a lawyer friend who will look over the proposed change? Regards, Philip Sure, I'm happy to take point on that. I'll pass along the information from this thread and let the list know as soon as I hear something back from the lawyers. Thanks, -- Robinson
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 22:34, Robinson Tryon bishop.robin...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Philip Olson phi...@roshambo.org wrote: I avoid the topic of licenses whenever possible but let's make a decision. It feels like most would prefer dual licensing for code snippets (despite GPL and PHP not getting along all that well, ever) so let's do that. Okay. Does someone here have a lawyer friend who will look over the proposed change? Regards, Philip Sure, I'm happy to take point on that. I'll pass along the information from this thread and let the list know as soon as I hear something back from the lawyers. Woha. That would be awesome :D While you are at it; Who exactly is allowed to make this change? (And where/in which files?) The PHP Documentation Group is not explicitly defined anywhere, so does that mean this mailinglist? The named authors on http://php.net/manual? (and does that include the 'and several others'?) :P I personally have done 2 legal fixes (or breakages?) to the docs so far.. Unsure if I'm willing to risk the 3rd one :) -Hannes
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 18:04, Hannes Magnusson hannes.magnus...@gmail.com wrote: The PHP Documentation Group is not explicitly defined anywhere, so does that mean this mailinglist? The named authors on http://php.net/manual? (and does that include the 'and several others'?) :P Could the PHP Documentation Group be a list that's updated each year - perhaps dynamically - by tallying the activities of users and taking, say, the top ten or twenty from the previous calendar year? That would ensure that it's always a fresh list, instead of becoming as stale as some other statically-defined groups, and that answers definitively, once and for all, of whom this clandestine crew is comprised. ;-P -- /Daniel P. Brown Network Infrastructure Manager Documentation, Webmaster Teams http://www.php.net/
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
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
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 15:43, Hannes Magnusson hannes.magnus...@gmail.com wrote: As for the manual text itself, that attribution note was intentional choice by us when we changed the license couple of hours ago. s/hours/years :P -Hannes
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
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
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 4:40 AM, Hannes Magnusson hannes.magnus...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, when adding a use contributor note the note becomes 'property of the PHP Documentation Group' See http://no.php.net/manual/add-note.php This means that any note submitted here becomes the property of the PHP Documentation Group and will be available under the same license as the documentation. Ah, that's good to know! We did recently changed the manual license to CC-BY, and I must admit I didn't consider the consequences that had on the code snippets. I'm also unsure how we can fix that. Add a note all code examples are BSD licensed clause somewhere? There's a DFSG (draft) FAQ that provides some good insight on the topic: http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#docs Q: I'm writing documentation to accompany a free program. What license should I use for this documentation? A: We strongly suggest you use the same license as used for the program. Then it will be possible to take code and put it into the documentation, and vice versa. If you would like to grant some extra freedoms for the documentation not granted for the remainder of the software package (eg freedom to distribute as a paper manual without corresponding document source) we recommend you use a dual license: one of which grants these extra freedoms, and the other the same license as the program. Given that the PHP License isn't compatible with the GPL, then yes, I think choosing a permissive license like the New BSD License is an appropriate choice. 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. I'm sure that people will re-use code from the manual with or without an explicit license to it, but it makes a lot of sense to formalize the whole thing, keeping our codebases and licenses all nice and tidy. Cheers, --R
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
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). Hannes, The CC-BY license states, in addition to what you pointed out, the following: - *Other Rights* — In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: - Your fair dealing or fair usehttp://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Do_Creative_Commons_licenses_affect_fair_use.2C_fair_dealing_or_other_exceptions_to_copyright.3Frights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations; - The author's moralhttp://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#I_don.E2.80.99t_like_the_way_a_person_has_used_my_work_in_a_derivative_work_or_included_it_in_a_collective_work.3B_what_can_I_do.3Frights; - Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicityhttp://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#When_are_publicity_rights_relevant.3For privacy rights. This is the provision from which I derived that fair use avoids infringement even if credit is not given. That being said, if it is the opinion of the group that the CC-BY combined with the provisions of fair use do not protect someone who uses the snippets, then they simply need to give credit. FWIW I don't see a significant problem here with giving credit. A line in a README file that says Some snippets adapted from documentation provided by The PHP Documentation Group would solve the issue entirely. The specific names of the individuals that constitute the PHP Documentation Group are irrelevant; the license says The PHP Documentation Group is who owns the copyright, so that's who gets the credit. I still don't see a significant issue or a reason to change our licensing. Furthermore, I don't see why we should change our license to help out the GPL folks, especially when they've shown considerable disregard for the rights of others in the software community, most recently in the fight over Wordpress themes. So PHP should help out the GPL community, but the GPL community screws the PHP community? I think not. For the above stated reasons I'm not in favor of a license change at this point. Brandon
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
Pardon this old doc dinosaur for meddling in this thread, just a couple of comments: - IIRC there was never a notes group as such. It was mainly a mailing list, some code we hacked and some rules of thumb, and whoever had the time will chip in ad do some notes housekeeping once in a while. Ergo, the notes, code and text should formally be responsability of the doc group (which is a changing entity over the years). - Not sure as pointed out by Brandon, that theres is a need for licensing code snippets separately, they usually are exemplars of concepts and techniques, small and simple, and not significant enough to warrant all that work (being that there is a provision for fair use). I would suggest the current doc maintainers to use Occam's razor in this respect :-) Now, I am not a lawyer, and don't even play one in RPGs, just a crusty old chemist/code mangler. Keep up the good work. Cheers -- Jesus M. Castagnetto je...@castagnetto.com Web: http://www.castagnetto.com/ On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 08:59, Brandon Savage bran...@brandonsavage.netwrote: 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). Hannes, The CC-BY license states, in addition to what you pointed out, the following: - *Other Rights* — In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: - Your fair dealing or fair usehttp://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Do_Creative_Commons_licenses_affect_fair_use.2C_fair_dealing_or_other_exceptions_to_copyright.3Frights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations; - The author's moralhttp://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#I_don.E2.80.99t_like_the_way_a_person_has_used_my_work_in_a_derivative_work_or_included_it_in_a_collective_work.3B_what_can_I_do.3Frights; - Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicityhttp://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#When_are_publicity_rights_relevant.3For privacy rights. This is the provision from which I derived that fair use avoids infringement even if credit is not given. That being said, if it is the opinion of the group that the CC-BY combined with the provisions of fair use do not protect someone who uses the snippets, then they simply need to give credit. FWIW I don't see a significant problem here with giving credit. A line in a README file that says Some snippets adapted from documentation provided by The PHP Documentation Group would solve the issue entirely. The specific names of the individuals that constitute the PHP Documentation Group are irrelevant; the license says The PHP Documentation Group is who owns the copyright, so that's who gets the credit. I still don't see a significant issue or a reason to change our licensing. Furthermore, I don't see why we should change our license to help out the GPL folks, especially when they've shown considerable disregard for the rights of others in the software community, most recently in the fight over Wordpress themes. So PHP should help out the GPL community, but the GPL community screws the PHP community? I think not. For the above stated reasons I'm not in favor of a license change at this point. Brandon
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 03:56, Adam Harvey ahar...@php.net wrote: On 3 October 2010 08:43, Robinson Tryon bishop.robin...@gmail.com wrote: Is there any chance that the code examples in the manual are also available under a different license as well? As you've seen on the licensing page, the manual — including the code examples — is only available under the CC-BY licence. Given the number of contributors over the years, I think it's unlikely that we'd be able to relicense (or dual license) to anything else at this point. Actually, when adding a use contributor note the note becomes 'property of the PHP Documentation Group' See http://no.php.net/manual/add-note.php This means that any note submitted here becomes the property of the PHP Documentation Group and will be available under the same license as the documentation. We did recently changed the manual license to CC-BY, and I must admit I didn't consider the consequences that had on the code snippets. I'm also unsure how we can fix that. Add a note all code examples are BSD licensed clause somewhere? -Hannes
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
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. Now, the two caveats here are this: first, I'm not a lawyer by trade, but a software developer. And second, this interpretation may not be compatible with certain licenses (the GPL in particular seems to think it can rewrite copyright law and limit fair use and define how derivative works are handled, both of which are it's problem). That all being said, I'm still not sure we have any obligation to change the license at all. Brandon
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 16:06, Jesus M. Castagnetto je...@castagnetto.com wrote: Pardon this old doc dinosaur for meddling in this thread, just a couple of comments: - IIRC there was never a notes group as such. It was mainly a mailing list, some code we hacked and some rules of thumb, and whoever had the time will chip in ad do some notes housekeeping once in a while. Ergo, the notes, code and text should formally be responsability of the doc group (which is a changing entity over the years). - Not sure as pointed out by Brandon, that theres is a need for licensing code snippets separately, they usually are exemplars of concepts and techniques, small and simple, and not significant enough to warrant all that work (being that there is a provision for fair use). I would suggest the current doc maintainers to use Occam's razor in this respect :-) its quite scary to apply Occam's razor on legal matters.. :) Robinson point is that the GPL license is incompatible with the current license of all examples and user contributed codes in the manual. Be it edgecase incompatibility or what, we need to take a conscious decision of either ignore it or fix it.. :) -Hannes
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Brandon Savage bran...@brandonsavage.net wrote: The CC-BY license states [...some things...] ... This is the provision from which I derived that fair use avoids infringement even if credit is not given. (IANAL) but it's entirely possible that a Fair Use defense would be successful against claims of copyright infringement... That being said, if it is the opinion of the group that the CC-BY combined with the provisions of fair use do not protect someone who uses the snippets, then they simply need to give credit. ...that being said, I'm not sure that even the group's opinion is strong enough to provide sufficient legal protection for snippets, (and how long is a snippet, anyhow?). What I mean is, even if The PHP Documentation Group makes a formal statement that in their opinion the CC-BY license on the manual allows people to make use of example code as long as they just provide attribution, that formal statement might not hold up in court. FWIW I don't see a significant problem here with giving credit. A line in a README file that says Some snippets adapted from documentation provided by The PHP Documentation Group would solve the issue entirely. The specific names of the individuals that constitute the PHP Documentation Group are irrelevant; the license says The PHP Documentation Group is who owns the copyright, so that's who gets the credit. That level of attribution sounds compatible with just about every license out there. 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 still don't see a significant issue or a reason to change our licensing. Furthermore, I don't see why we should change our license to help out the GPL folks, especially when they've shown considerable disregard for the rights of others in the software community, most recently in the fight over Wordpress themes. So PHP should help out the GPL community, but the GPL community screws the PHP community? I think not. I think that the PHP community and GPL community share a number of important goals, such as the promotion of FOSS, the empowerment of users with powerful tools that they can modify and run themselves, and a drive to write the best software available. If one of the primary goals of the PHP community is to promote the use of PHP, then I would suggest that the leaders make it as easy as possible for people to start programming in the language, even if means giving people the flexibility to write new code and re-use example code under the GPL or a proprietary license. --R
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
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/
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Daniel Brown danbr...@php.net wrote: 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]. As suggested in the DFSG FAQ, I think that a dual-licensing scheme would provide the most clarity and flexibility for the code embedded in the documentation. (I'd also suggest putting the copyright notice before the license name, otherwise it's unclear whether it is the manual or the CC license that is copyright by the PHP Doc Group!) To riff off of your example: The PHP manual is Copyright (C) the PHP Documentation Group, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The machine code regions (AKA - code snippets) in the documentation or freely submitted by the public, are also licensed under the [MIT/NBSD]. I'm sure that there's a good way to tighten up the language about the example code/code snippets a bit. I'm sure we could find a lawyer or two to review the text, if it would be helpful. 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. Right, that's the starting point. I assume that the PHP Doc Group has copyright to all of the non-user-submitted code examples, so changing those over would just involve a (hopefully not too arduous) internal process. As for user-submitted code, I assume that the submission form does (or could easily) include a note about licensing or assigning copyright. If the Doc Group already has a sufficiently broad license to the existing content, as has been suggested in other emails, then relicensing these components should be pretty straightforward. 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 This is a good reason to put a clearly-worded notice on the submission page. Here's the text that Wikipedia puts on their edit pages: Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted...You irrevocably agree to release your contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license. See the Terms of Use for details. Basically you have to trust your contributors to actually hold copyright to their submissions, or to have knowledge that they are under a sufficiently permissive license (i.e. one that's CC-BY and NBSD/MIT -compatible) 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. Based on this it looks like the PHP Doc group holds the copyright to all of the material, so there's no barrier on that front to dual-licensing. --R
Re: [PHP-DOC] License for code examples in the PHP manual?
On 3 October 2010 08:43, Robinson Tryon bishop.robin...@gmail.com wrote: Is there any chance that the code examples in the manual are also available under a different license as well? As you've seen on the licensing page, the manual — including the code examples — is only available under the CC-BY licence. Given the number of contributors over the years, I think it's unlikely that we'd be able to relicense (or dual license) to anything else at this point. Adam
