Copyright notice (was: Docs Project meeting minutes 13 July 2011)

[Richard Fontana]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 02:53:55PM -0400, Eric Christensen wrote:
> 
> On Jul 14, 2011 2:10 PM, "Petr Kovar" <pkovar at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > As a follow-up to the copyright discussion we had during the IRC meeting:
> > my point was that some [previous] authors of Fedora docs were not necessarily
> > Fedora Contributors at time of authorship (like e.g. Eric Foster-Johnson
> > who wrote the original RPM Guide, AFAIK).
> 
> IIRC, if the original work is licensed so we can make a derivative work, like
> we have in the case of the RPM Guide, the person making the derivative owns the
> copyright for their work and provides attribution back to the source.

If a Fedora doc is based on some preexisting upstream work, the
license requirements applicable to that preexisting work must be
complied with. That may affect this issue, because it is common for
licenses to require preservation of existing copyright notices. I
don't recall how this affected the RPM Guide in particular.

> > Maybe adding "and others" at the end of the copyright notice would solve the
> > problem in such cases?

No more Gilligan's Island copyright notices please. :-) 

I think there were additional issues with the RPM Guide which Karsten
and I intended to examine. 

 - RF