Re: annoying glib licencing stuff

[Mathieu Lacage <Mathieu Lacage sophia inria fr>]

On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 09:49 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:

> > > I would be happy if someone could approve the other patch attached
> > > (license.patch):
> > >   - re-add the list of contributors in a separate chapter at the end of
> > > the gobject-doc.sgml file.
> > >   - add a copyright statement at the top of gobject-doc.sgml including
> > > me and the other major contributors. I have no idea who the "other major
> > > contributors" are for the parts of the document I did not write and the
> > > parts which are automatically extracted from the source code so I did
> > > put only my name there. (adding more is a matter of adding a <copyright>
> > > tag with its <year> and <holder> tags)
> 
> The problem with making the license for the gtk and glib api docs more
> explicit is that we currently don't have a list of contributors. Someone
> will have to sit down with cvs annotate and produce such a list, before
> we can contact all contributors to ask for their agreement on whatever
> license we want to put in the docs.

_my_ documentation was clearly and unambiguously contributed to the
gnome cvs module gobject-doc under that license: I did send at least one
email stating this here and proper licensing/copyright statements are
present in that module. It appears that this constraint has not been
taken into account (i.e., the license was violated since at least the
copyright statements were removed) when the documentation was imported
in glib's docs and I am somewhat guilty for not realizing this sooner.

If what you say is true, that is, there is a need for some archeology to
find all contributors and get licensing statements out of them, I
suggest we follow the following actions:

1) mark the specific xml files for which you know the
copyright/licensing status with xml comments stating these. Something
similar to the standard large licensing comments found in any .c or .h
file.

2) send emails to potential contributors asking for a licensing
statement and mark their .xml files with comments similar to 1) saying
that the copyright and licensing status of that file is unknown.

3) state in the documentation in a way which is visible to the end-
developers that parts of that documentation are covered by license X,
copyright Y, and that the rest of the documentation is currently under
unknown status.

regards,
Mathieu
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