Policy for contributions to www.kde.org

[Waldo Bastian]

On Thursday 30 January 2003 02:21, Dirk Mueller wrote:
> There is a short list of possible licenses for these kind of documents
> here:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#OtherLicenses
>
> As we use the GPL and the FDL already, these two are possible candidates
> for a KDE web page license policy. There is also the possibility to use the
> FreeBSD documentation license or the BSD/X11 license.
>
> Do you think we can agree on one license?

I would hope so, but I'm afraid it's like asking people to agree on one single 
editor.

> it would avoid having to
> explicitely state the license in each and every document that is added to
> the webpage CVS. Instead, one could blindly assume that whoever is working
> on a document in the kde-www CVS module, is using license XXX.
>
> Otherwise, an explicit comment with copyright and comment has to be added
> to the documents.

I would recommend to make it mandatory for each page to have a small comment 
that explicitly states the copyright holder(s) and the license. Perhaps 
something like 
<?php copyright="Copyright 2003 Davaldo Grulow"; license="FDL"; ?>

In addition to that I suggest to make a page that lists the licenses 
acceptable for web-pages. Ideally that should only contain 1 license, but I'm 
a bit pessimistic about the feasability of that.

Perhaps even more important is the copyright and license on images. Ideally 
the image itself should contain a copyright statement (I think most image 
formats have provisions for that), but that information isn't very accessable 
most of the time. Would it be feasible to require that each file "image.png" 
is being accompanied by a "image.png.copyright" file? Since that is a pain in 
the ass in general, we should make it as easy as possible, perhaps by 
generating such file as part of "cvs commit". The commit comment for new .png 
(and possible other image formats) files should then include lines with 
COPYRIGHT: and LICENSE: and the cvs commit scripts could enforce that and 
generate a .copyright file from it. It might even be possible to run a tool 
that inserts these copyright statements as comment fields in the image files 
themselves (in addition to the .copyright file).

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com