[Evergreen-web-team] copyright statement

[Dan Scott]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 4:25 PM, Lori Bowen Ayre <lori.ayre at galecia.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> I attended the EG Oversight Board mtg this morning and we talked about
> things like footers and attribution statements that should be used now that
> we are officially a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
> What I think we should do is propose some guidelines for language people
> should use on the evergreen-ils website pages as well as in the OPAC or
> wherever else Evergreen is running and info about Evergreen licensing can be
> included.
> An appropriate variation for Evergreen might look like this:
>
> © 2008-2011 GPLS and others | Partially funded by the Library Services &
> Technology Act through the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
>
> © 2011 SFC/Evergreen.  The Evergreen project is a member the Software
> Freedom Conservancy.  All content on the Evergreen project  website is
> available under the Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 License.
>  Evergreen is open-source software, licensed under the GNU General Public
> License (GPL), version 2.
>
> I suggest this is a discussion starter.  I've invited Dan Scott in on this
> thread too.  Comments?

To provide a tiny bit more context, the discussion about adding a
statement to the footer stemmed from a suggestion made by Bradley Kuhn
of the Software Freedom Conservancy; he suggested making the
relationship between the Software Freedom Conservancy and the
Evergreen project clear. The "Evergreen joins the Software Freedom
Conservancy" blog post serves that purpose for now until it is no
longer one of the newest blog posts; and the SFC logo is nice and
clear in the "Support Evergreen" block, but I suspect few people will
realize that is the SFC logo or that we're a member of the SFC until
they click through. I therefore suggested adding another line to the
footer similar to what Lori proposed. However, I was thinking much
more basic - simply:

"The Evergreen project is a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy."

We could make "member of the Software Freedom Conservancy" a link to
the membership announcement blog post, where the nature of the
relationship is revealed for interested parties. If we want to keep
the footer as clean as possible, this statement could just live on the
front page next to the "Evergreen is open source software, freely
licensed under the GNU GPL." statement.

I realize that you're looking to license the web content under a CC
license at some point, but I wouldn't mix that into this discussion
(you need to get the consent of all copyright holders over the content
of the Web site before you can place it under any license). I wouldn't
make a copyright statement about "SFC/Evergreen", either, as
"SFC/Evergreen" is not a real legal entity. And given that we state
the project license in the second sentence on the home page, in the
FAQs, and in the code itself, I'm not sure we need the license of the
project's code in the footer.