Translation Copyrights (was Translations for LSR project)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 23:21 +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> Clytie Siddall wrote:
> > 
> > I have a <sigh> licensing question. How does such a statement affect  
> > those of us who have already assigned our translation copyright to  
> > the FSF (for example, translators who contribute to The Translation  
> > Project)?
> 
> This is not a problem, IMHO.  The copyright assignment papers that
> we've signed to FSF refer to the translations which we are willing to
> assign copyright to the FSF.  For me, this is every single translation
> I make, but it totally depends on you.  Also note that the Disclaimer
> of the TP is *not* actually a copyright assignment, e.g. the FSF does
> not act as assignee.  For that you need to write to assign gnu org 
> 
> I'm considering this is a good idea, because imagine the following
> scenario, which in fact actually happens sometimes:
> 
> The copyright holders of Foobar decide to relicense the program from
> GPL to BSD-like license.  Someone takes the BSD code and makes a
> derived proprietary version.  In order to include my translation,
> they'll have to ask approval from the FSF, which won't be given (in
> fact it won't be given to relisence it to BSD at first instance).  So,
> it better protects our work and ensures that it will never enhance
> non-free software.  Unfortunately, people sometimes change their mind
> about freedom.

Hold up.  For those translators that have assigned all their
translation copyrights to the FSF, what license is the FSF
putting those licenses under?  Is there some procedure for
specifying the appropriate license for each translation that
the FSF will elect to abide by?  (If you've truly assigned
all the copyrights, you can't force their hand, but they may
choose to license under your selected terms, if it's free.)

This is a very important question with huge implications on
the licensing of our platform as a whole, and we don't even
need to look to the CPL and other non-FSF licenses to find
problems.  Our developer platform is almost entirely LGPL.
Our documentation is almost entirely FDL.  If the licenses
of the corresponding translations don't match those, then
we have some serious problems.

--
Shaun