inconsistent Sagemath doc licenses - a fix is needed

[Dima Pasechnik]

As pointed out in https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/n0B16q4h2c8/iHhDLRD5BwAJ

various places in src/doc/ mention different (incompatible, according to Debian people) licenses

for the documentation.

We ought to do something about it.

 GFDL is only mentioned in src/doc/en/reference/history_and_license/index.rst

while CC-BY-SA v3.0 is mentioned in src/doc/en/reference/index.rst

I propose to make everything CC-BY-SA v3.0 which seems to be more reasonable one.

Dima

[William Stein]

From a decade-old sage-devel thread [1], I wrote: " (3) We state
also that by making an explicit contribution to the SAGE wiki or the
SAGE documentation, that ones contribution is licensed under the
Create Commons 3.0 license. This should be prominently displayed on
the SAGE wiki home page."

And indeed, ever since, we have clearly stated on the wiki [2] --
"License and Copyright. Contributions to the Sage wiki and to the Sage
documentation are licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA
license. By contributing, you agree to place your contribution under
that license."

Thus I think we are on very good legal footing to make that statement
in the COPYING file of the sage distribution, and remove any
contradictory claim about GFDL.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/sage-devel/joyner$20creative$20commons$20wiki%7Csort:relevance/sage-devel/8HHj4yLtjlE/1GH3B4_Vt4AJ
[2] https://wiki.sagemath.org/

William


> Dima
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "sage-devel" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to sage-devel+...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to sage-...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--
William (http://wstein.org)

[Dima Pasechnik]

OK, please see https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/22041

---ready for review.

[mmarco]

If I am not mistaken, the reference manual is automatically built from the docstrings in the source code files... which are GPL. How does that affect the resulting documentation?

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Thursday, December 8, 2016 at 8:41:55 PM UTC, mmarco wrote:

If I am not mistaken, the reference manual is automatically built from the docstrings in the source code files... which are GPL. How does that affect the resulting documentation?

well, we merely do a kind of dual license for the part of the source that are docstrings.

This should not be a problem, IMHO.

[mmarco]

I am not so sure about that. Is it safe to assume that the author of a file that clearly states to be under the GPL is also giving permission to release a derivative work under a dual license? 

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Friday, December 9, 2016 at 8:28:35 AM UTC, mmarco wrote:

I am not so sure about that. Is it safe to assume that the author of a file that clearly states to be under the GPL is also giving permission to release a derivative work under a dual license? 

By adding the code to Sage library, the author agrees to release the documentation under  CC-BY-SA v3.0.

Anyway, I think comments in the code without the code itself cannot be considered derived work. They are, well, documentation.

One way or another, the change on the ticket does not change this state of affairs. It merely cleans up an old typo.