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Mr. Aaron W. Swenson | 28 Nov 2011 04:11

Re: Supporting CC-BY-SA 3.0 and later versions

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 05:41:37PM +0000, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> With http://wiki.gentoo.org having their documents as CC-BY-SA 3.0, I
> thought it might be a good idea to work this out for our documents as well.
> That would allow us to "tech-write" stuff that is on the wiki properly, but
> also use the newer (and recommended) version.
>
> Of course, that won't be done by just making <license /> refer to the 3.0 as
> that will break our documents (legally, that is). Instead, I was considering
> to add  <at> version support to the license entity (in dtd and xsl), update the
> supporting documents (xml-guide and the like) so that this can be done less
> intrusively.
>
> In other words, support "<license version='3.0' />" for documents that need
> to be CC-BY-SA 3.0, or for new documents.
>
> What's your take on this?
>
> Wkr,
>         Sven Vermeulen
>

I'm for it, but what's keeping the docs team from just bumping the license
version?

According to the Gentoo Linux Documentation Project's (GLDP) policy [1], I
do not have a say in the matter regarding which license the document I
wrote is published under. This tells me that it's at the will of the GLDP
whether or not to republish the document under a new license, essentially

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Sven Vermeulen | 28 Nov 2011 19:05

Re: Supporting CC-BY-SA 3.0 and later versions

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 10:11:28PM -0500, Mr. Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
> I'm for it, but what's keeping the docs team from just bumping the license
> version?
> 
> According to the Gentoo Linux Documentation Project's (GLDP) policy [1], I
> do not have a say in the matter regarding which license the document I
> wrote is published under. This tells me that it's at the will of the GLDP
> whether or not to republish the document under a new license, essentially
> being just pointing `<license />' to the new text.
> 
> Which is all fine by me because the document I did write was done under
> the auspices of Gentoo. Meaning I assumed that once GLDP accepted my
> contribution, it then owns the documentation I contributed.

I don't think that's true. As far as I know (I knew European and Belgian law
some time ago, but not using that knowledge clouds it a bit  copyright
has not been transferred as long as this isn't done through a contract of
any kind. There were talks of asking developers to sign such a document, but
afaik this has never been implemented completely (although I know of a few
ebuild developers that did).

What we do is publish documents as allowed under its license, which is
CC-BY-SA 2.5. We are not allowed to change the license, unless the authors
of the document agree.

We *could* ask for all contributors to inform us if they allow their
documents to be licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 but that would be a nightmare to
manage I think.

Supporting <license version="3.0" /> seems like a simple solution to this.

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