[Kdeev-books] First cut - scripting chapter, dcop chapterand structure

[Ralf Nolden]

On Sonntag, 31. August 2003 17:06, Jan Schumacher wrote:
> On Sunday 31 August 2003 15:43, Ralf Nolden wrote:
> > I know this is sometimes difficult to understand that this is an ongoing
> > effort and that you certainly don't want to grant anyone rights that are
> > exclusively your own rights primarily to prevent misusage of them.
> > However, I think the goal of the kdeev-books project is to work with the
> > e.V. to establish developer documentation that are available to anyone at
> > any time with having the e.V. taking care of the things like
> > copyright/license violations and publication - other documentation can of
> > course be provided or linked to if authors aren't fine with the
> > requirements for this books project. I mean, anyone is free to do what
> > he/she wants in his/her free time anyway and as much as I recognize
> > people being more willing to contribute to a project type like KDE where
> > your single parts are still under your copyright but on the other hand I
> > think in particular the documentation that is suitable to be provided as
> > an add-on by the KDE e.V. is one resource that should fall under the KDE
> > e.V.'s responsibility with the authors still having their copyright and
> > all their rights, so you're not loosing anything. You just grant the KDE
> > e.V. the right to publish your work, just like the KDE project publishes
> > your sourcecode in conjunction with the rest of the KDE distribution of
> > any KDE version.
>
> What does the KDE e.V. need any additional rights for beyond the rights
> granted by a suitably free license? The source code for example is already
> being published without any copyright reassignment. Note that this wouldn't
> be possible at any rate in Germany (AFAIK IANAL) because the legal concept
> of "copyright" is different: you can only grant particular rights of use if
> you are the creator or a work -- it will always stay yours legally. This
> grant of usage, however, is the same as that you would get from the GPL of
> the source. Unless, of course, you are talking about an exclusive right.
> Copyright reassignment makes one imortant difference: the new owner of the
> work can re- or duallicense it like Trolltech does with QT. But why would
> KDE e.V. want to do that?
In case we want to re-lincense the books under the GPL for instance ?

I think we first have to really read over the pages on the license itself:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#DocumentationLicenses
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-howto-opt.html

especially the optional features.

Note that I still didn't have the time nor the patience to go through all of 
this, so before we start working on text we should go for a) if we use the 
FDL b) which optional condidtions we use and c) wether the KDE e.V. needs to 
have exclusive rights or not. My personal opinion is that I would like to 
have the KDE e.V. hold a position that only the KDE e.V. can fullfill in 
terms of, as mentioned, relicensing, if we discover that the GPL is much 
better suitable. Reaching documentation writers after years is a PITA similar 
to authors of software, but if we use the optional features of the FDL then 
even a removal of the optional features, if encountered the better solution, 
won't be possible. This is why I would like to have the general license be 
the FDL plus granting the e.V. the exclusive right to decide about optional 
features and to relicense it under the GPL or another free documentation 
license listed under the documentation licenses section on gnu.org. As said, 
I still don't really know what is the best thing here, I'm just making 
proposals.

Ralf
>
> Regards
> Jan
>
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-- 
We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs.
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Ralf Nolden
nolden at kde.org

The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org
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