Documentation Licensing

[David Miller]

Matthew P. Barnson wrote:

> However, there is one provision of the GFDL not being met that, while not
> wanting to be a jerk about it, I'd prefer Bugzilla adhere to: leaving my
> copyright intact.  Right now, by removing my copyright (haven't looked in
> the CVS log to see who did it) and my name from the principal author list,
> Bugzilla's in violation of the GFDL.  I have a few doc patches that I
> really need to check in, and, if nobody objects, I'll remedy this in my
> next checkin.  I realize that I haven't contributed meaningfully in quite
> some time, but I was still the author, and the GFDL requires author and
> copyright notices be added to, not removed.

I don't think it was intentional to take your name off of billing, I 
think the intent at the time was only to get the people list there who 
you would go to if you wanted stuff added.  I have no objection to 
putting it back (nor can I object under the current license ;)

I know the only thing I had explicitly authorized to go away was the 
document history section.  It made the table of contents very hard to 
find, since it was on the same page with it, and that information is 
readily available from CVS anyway.  My actual instructions were to move 
it below the table of contents, but I think the docbook stylesheets made 
that difficult to do.

> I think that the only developers from whom we'll need to obtain consent to
> change the copyright are JustDave, Jake (can we do that with him on-duty?),
> Zach Lipton, and myself.  

Jake has been occasionally online... he did manage to get net access 
from his bunker, and is actually the unofficial networking guy for his 
unit :)   Unfortunately, I can imagine given the recent events there 
(he's stationed at the Abu Gahraib prison, which has been all over the 
news the last couple weeks), that they might be cracking down on what 
folks get access to.  And in case anyone's wondering, the two Military 
Police units actually involved in all the crap going on there are based 
in Pennsylvania and Maryland; Jake's unit is based in Michigan.

As for others to get consent from, there's actually been a variety of 
people contributing to docs recently.  We'll probably need to go through 
the checkin logs and check the related bugs and so forth.  Gerv (not on 
your list) has made some major contributions.  There's also been several 
smaller contributions from other folks.

-- 
Dave Miller      Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System
http://www.justdave.net/             http://www.bugzilla.org/