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

[Christopher Antila]

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Greetings:

I'm glad that we're having this discussion, because there are internal issues 
that need to be cleared up *before* they become issues elsewhere.

I hadn't previously noticed the biggest issue here, which is the hypothetical 
situation where another group wants to re-use Fedora Docs material. If, for 
example, Ubuntu wanted to re-release the Musicians' Guide, they would try to 
write a CC-BY-SA attribution statement, and find the following text on the 
front page of the Guide:

"Christopher Antila
Fedora Documentation Project
crantila at feodraproject.org
- -------------------------------------------------
Legal Notice
Copyright (c) 2011 Red Hat, Inc. and others"

To whom would Ubuntu attribute the document? Reading a little further into the 
Legal Notice, we see this:

"The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the Fedora 
Project as the "Attribution Party" for purposes of CC-BY-SA."

For me, this clears up the question of attribution. But what of the Red Hat 
copyright notice?

I agree that we need a copyright notice, and I suggest that every appearance 
of "Red Hat" in the Legal Notice is replaced with something like "Author 
Group" or "Authors of This Document," possibly with a hyperlink, but definitely 
with an Appendix titled "Author Group" or "Authors of This Document" or 
something like that. This allows us to attribute copyright to all contributors 
to a document, while at the same time keeping a clean appearance on the front 
page. In fact, I'd be happy with entirely removing the list of authors from 
the front page.

As for attribution to the Fedora wiki, I wrote this CC-BY-SA attribution 
notice into the Musicians' Guide after re-using documentation from elsewhere.
[0] Please feel free to use it as a template, or to ignore it, as desired. (As 
an aside, I just noticed poor formatting on that page--shame on me!)

My scholarly "spider senses" suggest that we're actually talking about issues 
of communal ownership in an individual-centric society. I'm going to briefly 
research how other open-source organizations have solved similar problems, 
then post my findings to this list.


Christopher.

[0] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Musicians_Guide/sect-
Musicians_Guide-SC-Basic_Programming-Legal_Attribution.html
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