Bug#238245: Volunteer to help with mass-relicensing of website when the time comes to do so (was Re: Proposed plan (and license) for the webpage relicensing)
Bradley M. Kuhn
Debian website still says "Copyright SPI" and is licensed under OPL. I
wanted to chime in to volunteer my help.
Tommi Vainikainen wrote on 2005-10-16:
>>>> Does missing paperwork create a problem?
Francesco Poli wrote on 2005-10-16:
>>> I think it does, unfortunately.
...
>>> A less difficult solution is ... simply asking for a license
>>> change: each copyright holder should be tracked, contacted and asked
>>> to agree with the relicensing.
Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote on 2006-04-19:
>> b) old contributors to the web site (i.e. all that have had CVS access to the
>> WWW CVS are for the past 10 years) should be contacted and ask to
>> agree to this license change.
MJ Ray wrote on 2006-04-21:
> I will help with this, if you wish.
I also wanted to volunteer my time to help with this part of the
solution whenever the Debian community is ready to move forward. I have
some experiencing handling mass-relicensing of copyrights when no
copyright assignments are in place. For example, through my work at the
Software Freedom Conservancy, I assisted the Squeak community in
relicensing their software under a Free Software license (previously it
had been under a semi-Free Software, "no commercial only" license).
It's a common misconception that relicensing cannot be done without
copyright assignment and/or by getting explicit, written assent from
each copyright holder. While explicit and written assent from each
copyright holder is the ideal, various public mechanisms and call for
comment periods can be used for those contributors that are difficult to
track down.
I don't think there's any need to go into the details about this now; my
point in sending this email is to offer my help as a volunteer when the
Debian community is ready to handle the relicensing from OPL.
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Francesco Poli
> Someone recently pointed me to this thread in a discussion about why the
> Debian website still says "Copyright SPI" and is licensed under OPL. I
> wanted to chime in to volunteer my help.
[...]
> my point in sending this email is to offer my help as a volunteer when the
> Debian community is ready to handle the relicensing from OPL.
Your offer to help is really appreciated, at least from my side.
Thanks a lot indeed!
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Stefano Zacchiroli
> Hi Bradley, I'm getting back to you about the above as in Debian we're
> now ready to finalize the relicensing of www.debian.org ("www.d.o" for
> short) from OPL and could use some expert advice on the next steps.
Brief status update on this, after a brief off-list mail exchange with
Bradley. He has kindly confirmed his willingness to help (thanks!), but
he is very busy with work at Software Freedom Conservancy for the next 3
months at least. I note this down here, so that others might remember to
check back with him then, given that I'll probably forget about this :-)
In the meantime, he has pointed us to some "related work" we might learn
from, the Squeak relicensing that the developer communities conducted
following Bradley's advice. The best reference I've found about that
effort is http://www.netjam.org/squeak/contributors/ , but according to
this and other comments by Bradley it looks like we are on good track:
- we have already contacted all the contributors and heard back from
quite a number of them
- then, we will need a list of website "lines" that are: 1/ still
active, and 2/ for which we do *not* have received permission to
relicence. (It's not clear to me if we have this already or not; can
someone clarify?)
- once we have the above (and assuming those lines are not
renounce-able), we might want to ask lawyer advice to verify if the
lines in question are copyrightable. Once we have the set of lines in
question, I can look into that with the help of SPI lawyers
- at that point we might do a public call announcing we are going to
relicense and ask if anyone have issues with it
Somewhat orthogonally to the above, I think it wouldn't hurt having a
public place where we keep track of the process. David (or anyone else
who has followed this closely) would it be feasible/easy to have, say, a
subpage of http://www.debian.org/license, where we keep up to date all
the info we have about the ongoing relicensing?
Thank again to Bradley for the help thus far, which has already been
quite useful!
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . za...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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