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

[Eric "Sparks" Christensen]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:46, David Nalley
<david.nalley at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> That is only a valid objection if the suggestion was (c) Fedora Project
>>> but (c) Fedora Project contributors says something different.  It means
>>> *individual* Fedora project contributors hold the copyright to their
>>> contributions which is certainly possible and is the case here.
>>
>> Correct.  But if we do that then we should just list *who* holds the copyrights.
>
>
> I personally think that's unmaintainable. And here's why:
> First, with some of our guides that have seen organic growth over
> releases there are scores of people with copyright claims. Who is
> going to ensure that it's right, up to date, and who is going to want
> to page through it? Secondly, we have translators who don't get
> attribution until the next release for their work.

IRT translators and their work: This is another reason why translators
should own their work instead of handing it back to us for
publication.  The translators do put their copyright information on
their PO files so it's there in the source but their name should
appear with the copyright notice on the *translated* document.  Since
they didn't contribute to the English version, unless they contribute
outside of their translation duties, then they don't hold any
copyright to that version.

>
> Do we really want this kind of copyright notice:
>
> (c) Copyright 200x-2011 Fabian Affolter, Amanpreet Singh Alam,
...
> Zacarão, Izaac Zavaleta, Red Hat Inc, and others.

That might be a bit extreme...  :)

>
> That's the list of contributors on the F15 Install Guide. The above
> list (since it doesn't have all of the translators) isn't complete,
> and it has some errant contributions (assuming that RHT employees who
> contribute work don't retain copyright, and then we have people like
> Paul Frields who have contributed as employee and non-employee). Add
> to that that we have a good chunk of information on the wiki and no
> good way to list who the contributors there are.

When we take information from the wiki and move it into a guide we are
really not attributing the work back to the original author which is
in violation of the CC-BY-SA license.

> So I am going to say something that is likely to be unpopular. I think
> we should go with (c) Copyright 2011 Fedora Project Contributors as
> that would cover both RHT contributions and individual contributors,
> or perhaps as Richard suggested, no explicit copyright notice. It's
> less effort to maintain, it scales to other places like the wiki, and
> our websites.

Yes, it scales well but doesn't provide information to someone that
may want to use our information and needs to know who to attribute it
to.

> That said, I am currently doing precious little of the
> work in Docs, so my opinion may hold little weight.

You have licensed your works, that we still use, to us (Fedora) so
your opinion holds as much weight as the rest of us that have
contributed.

> I am also somewhat worried that we really aren't talking about
> copyright notices, and if that's the case we should discuss the real
> issue.

To me this is a multi-faceted discussion of both copyright, licensing,
and the associated attribution.  Now if there are other issues afoot
then we should be made aware of that sooner than later.

--Eric