Re: Licensing and copyright

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Hi Rob,

Rob Adams <readams readams net> writes:

> OK I have prepared a preliminary draft document that I think is a good
> starting point.
>
> You can take a look at:
> HTML: http://readams.net/copyright/gnome-copyright/
> PDF:  http://readams.net/copyright/gnome-copyright.pdf
> XML:  http://readams.net/copyright/gnome-copyright.xml
>
> Please send me any comments you have, or if you prefer to directly edit
> the XML, send me changes in unified context diff format (diff -u).

Thanks for the good document.

Comments:

In 2.3:
   "The GNOME Foundation does not recommend doing this, however, since
    the future freedom of the software cannot necessarily be assured
    if you, for example, assign your copyright to an organization not
    interesting in keeping the software Free."

I think it should be s/not interesting/not interested/ ;)

In 3.1:
   "...we want to make it possible for commercial software to be
    written for the GNOME platform."

That should probably be "proprietary software", because Ximian Desktop
is very "commercial software" last I've heard, yet it isn't
proprietary (at least I think it isn't).  And this part is about
LGPL software, which especially allows proprietary software to link
against it.


When one of those "PROCEDURE HERE" is finished, it would be also nice
to extend it for some common special cases, like translators.  Eg. I
have sent my disclaimer for any translations I do for TP (Translation
Project), basically assigning my copyright to FSF for any of those.
I believe any other translator who's a member of both TP and GTP is
in the similar situation, so it should be much easier for them to
assign their copyrights to FSF, if they want to.  Here we come across
another issue of someone _not_ wanting copyright to their Gnome
translations to be transferred to FSF, yet they have sent a blanket 
statement regarding any translations of GNU software to FSF (that's
how general form from TP looks like).

Hope this helps, and gives a couple of areas still blury which might
need describing.

Cheers,
Danilo