Documentation license change and translations [was: Re: GNOME Sudoku Manual Copyright]

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

[See my comments below.]

On Thu, 2011-12-01 at 10:08 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-12-01 at 09:28 +0100, Andre Klapper wrote:
> > On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 09:44 -0500, Tiffany Antopolski wrote:
> > > The manual is being rewritten using Mallard.  Chris Beiser, a
> > > google-code-in student worked on this.  He is including some material
> > > from the docbook version, which is why he requested a licence change.
> > > The new mallard docs will be available in 3.4.
> > 
> > Have the licenses of the translations been checked, and if translators
> > explicitly put them under GFDL have translators been contacted to also
> > double-license the translations, or put them "under the same license"?
> > 
> > Asking because I had the same problem (reusing some material from the
> > docbook verson) with the Evolution manual rewrite.
> 
> Wow, good point. I had never thought of that issue. We don't really
> track the license of any of our translations, docs or UI, except by
> just saying "It's under the same license as the parent module." And
> that can be complicated by modules with complicated licenses. Have
> any translators ever read the COPYING file in yelp-xsl?
> 
> I'd say that, if the original translator of the DocBook manual isn't
> around and working on the Mallard help, then translation teams should
> probably start from scratch on their translations.

As I rewrote the Evolution documentation for GNOME 3.2 and wanted (and
did) reuse some parts of the old manual, I'm going to explain what I
did:

1) Check the license of the old Evolution manual (GFDL 1.2):
http://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution/tree/help/C/evolution.xml?h=gnome-2-32#n7871

2) Contact the owner of the old manual and ask for relicensing:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2010-December/msg00170.html
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2011-May/msg00001.html
In this case it was easy as authors/editors were either Novell folks or
me, plus there was a copyright assignment in place for Evolution until a
few years ago.
I asked for dual-licensing the old manual under GFDL 1.3 and CC-SA3.0,
as GFDL 1.3 Section 11 allows this (though this was intended for wikis,
as I was told by James Vasile of Softwarefreedom.org).

3) The license change was done in this commit by Chen (Evolution
maintainer) after he had talked to the Novell Legal Team:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution/commit/help?id=1274acf8c030ad588d9510636432c042b7cc464c

4) Check existing translations of the old documentation.
I didn't see a problem for existing doc translations (.po
files with extracted messages) that included the line "This file is
distributed under the same license as the evolution package." at the
beginning.

5) Contact those translators / translation teams that miss such a line,
or have explicitly stated "This file is distributed under GNU Free
Documentation License 1.2.". The latter case applied for the Czech
translation. I contacted the (only) Czech translator of the old
documentation and CCed gnome-cs-list gnome org and he agreed in public
(on gnome-cs-list gnome org) that I can change the line to "This file is
distributed under the same license as the evolution package.", which I
did.

With regard to the last step I am quoting James again:
"It is somewhat questionable whether this is sufficient to give you
rights to their work on any license Novell sees fit to apply to the
Evolution package at any date in the future (including, for example, a
proprietary one). Contributors have expectations that the licenses will
be honored and not switched without their permission.  Unless you were
extremely clear to your translation team that the clause you cite means
what you claim, you should strongly consider getting the translators'
permissions."

However I currently don't plan to contact them all.

Note that files of my new manual that reuse parts of the old manual do
not have to be under both licenses. According to James it is enough if
they are under Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0.

> But don't teams use translation memories that they share across team
> members and across projects? Doesn't that also introduce a potential
> for reusing copyrighted translations in places where you don't have
> permission to do so?

Yes, that might be an issue, but IANAL - legal-list gnome org might be a
good place to discuss this.

HTH,
andre
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