Proposal: end Gilligan's Island copyright notices in Fedora docs

[Christopher Antila]

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Ubuntu:
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The Ubuntu guides are published in a frameless format, and the bottom of every 
page contains the following statement:

"The material in this document is available under a free license, see Legal 
for details"

"Legal" is a link to this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/legal.html

The legal page contains a brief explanation of the CC-BY-SA licence that the 
project uses, along with a link to another web page that lists all contributor 
to the Ubuntu Documentation Team. They don't appear to have specific 
instructions on how their documentation should be attributed when borrowed.

OpenSUSE:
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The official documentation is available here: http://doc.opensuse.org/

Their guides begin with a copyright statement similar to ours, giving a 
publication date, assigning copyright to "Novell, Inc. and contributors" and 
deferring to the GNU FDL licence.

There is an "About This Guide" chapter, analogous to the Preface in Fedora 
guides. There is an "Acknowledgements" section that's similar to, but more 
generous than, the "Acknowledgements" section in some Fedora guides.

N.B. They have a style guide and two documentation guides that may be of 
interest to us. See previous link.

SUSE Linux:
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The last chapter of each official document is called "Legal," and it contains 
the licence for the document. Copyright is owned by Novell, Inc., and specific 
authors are not mentioned.

Debian:
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Their documentation is less standardized. Each document seems to have its own 
(similar) copyright statement, assigning copyright to specific people who 
contributed to the document. Most documents use the GNU GPL. Some documents 
have a section with more detailed "thanks" and attribution.

Gentoo:
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All contributors to a document are listed on the far right side of each page, 
in a column. The bottom of most pages gives the licence (CC-BY-SA 2.5 by 
default), and underneath that (on all pages) is a statement assigning 
copyright to "Gentoo Foundation, Inc."

GNOME:
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I can't find standardized legal information, but some documents have a 
statement like on this page:
http://library.gnome.org/users/dasher/unstable/index-info.html.en

All pages have the following notice at the very bottom:
"Copyright (c) 2005-2011 The GNOME Project"

This is too vague.

KDE:
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Each handbook has a list of "developers" at the top (I can only guess this is 
documentation developers), in addition to copyright notices for specific 
authors. This is confusing, and I'm not sure who should receive attribution. 
There is also a link to a "Legal Notice," which is a statement that the 
documents are subject to the GNU FDL.

Conclusions:
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We're exploring new territory. For the projects that I inspected, I cannot find 
anything that is more specific or useful than Fedora's current solution; some 
other projects are equally specific.
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