[Eg-oversight-board] Doc Licensing incompatibilities with FLOSS Manuals (was Re: Oversight Board meeting - Wednesday 10/17, 12:00-13:00 EDT)

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Like Dan, IANAL, but I've got some knowledge about Free Software
copyright licensing issues, and I've also cc'ed Tony to check over this
discussion and make sure we're all right on the copyright licensing
details.

Dan Scott wrote at 06:54 (PDT) on Wednesday:
>  The other concern that I initially had [in Evergreen's participation
> in the Google Summer of Code Doc Sprint Camp] was that there might be
> a copyright or licensing conflict with our own licensing approach, but
> I don't think that will be an issue as authors retain their copyright.
> So while content written during the sprint would go into
> flossmanuals.net under a GNU General Public License, because the
> authors retain copyright, they would also be able to contribute the
> same text that they wrote to our official docs under our normal doc
> license.

Dan's analysis is, IMO, completely correct with regard to new
documentation written from scratch, and with regard to any documentation
taken from FLOSS Manuals into Evergreen documentation, for which Dan
correctly advises:

> [3] A third party wouldn't be able to simply pull the content from
> flossmanuals.net and drop it directly into our docs; they would need
> to relicense it as CC-BY-SA-3.0 (our normal docs license, per
> http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.3/licensing.html ) which requires the
> permission of the authors.

There is one other licensing direction that Dan's email didn't address:
if folks participating in this Camp wish to start from existing
Evergreen Documentation and contribute derivative works to FLOSSManuals
as part of this Camp.  That has the "reverse issue" mentioned above.


FWIW, I've known the FLOSS Manuals folks for many years -- they do good
work and they're generally aware that their choice of GPL, rather than a
dual (GPL|CC-By-SA) license causes troubles like this.  They are
likely aware of the issues and should be able to help anyone
participating to do the right thing.

-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy