KMail documentation / Licenses

[Luigi Toscano]

David Bryant ha scritto:
> Hello. I'm the guy who wrote the documentation for KAddressBook about a year 
> ago.I got pretty busy with other stuff for a while, but now I have some time to 
> devote to KDE documentation. Since I use the KMail program a lot, and since 
> the documentation is for version 4.12 (2013-06-26) and pretty far out of date, 
> I'm planning to work on bringing that up to date (I have KMail 5.14.3 
> (20.04.3) running under Gentoo Linux right now -- the next release will 
> probably be "stable" in two or three months).

Yes, it is definitely out of date. Thanks for looking into it.
> 
> Anyway, I have a question. The template for docbooks at 
> 
> https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kdoctools/-/blob/master/src/template.docbook
> 
> implies that new or revised documentation should use the Creative Commons 
> License version 4 International. The existing documentation contains copyright 
> statements for both the program source code (GNU GPL) and for the 
> documentation itself (GNU Free Documentation License).
> 
> It seems to me that the program copyright ought not appear in the docbook -- 
> it is embedded in the program itself (Help --> About KMail). So I think I 
> ought to remove that one line. There is also a very long list of software 
> authors in the license / credits section, which ought to remain intact.

I'm a bit torn about that, I'd say that if there is a credit section, the
program license should still be there.

> My main question is about the copyright on the documentation. Should I update 
> to the Creative Commons License? If so, do I need to get permission from the 
> previous authors? I think there are just three of them: David Rugge, Daniel 
> Naber, and Scarlett Clark. I don't mind writing to each of them. I'm just not 
> certain about the correct procedure to follow here. I understand the XML stuff 
> fairly well. I need help with the legal stuff, though.

Unfortunately it is more complicated than that, and this is way we haven't
changed the license to any old manual so far. It is also not a matter of XML.
In general, not all contributor may have added their name to the
documentation, so you need to check the history of all files in git. The
history should be fairly complete, but it may require some attention (for
example, it may say "copied from this other place", and that means tracking
that source too).

Many of the older programs started their history 15/20 years ago, so it may be
difficult to track down the old contributors which moved away from the KDE
project.

I'd say: start contributing as it is with the current license, and publicly
declare your willingness to a future relicense to the new license. The best
way is to send a review request which adds your name to the first table of
this file:

https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kde-dev-scripts/-/blob/master/relicensecheck.pl

Ciao
-- 
Luigi