[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Updating Attributions

[Jason Etheridge]

<snip>
> giving them an opportunity to withhold their consent to an explicit
> license going forward, I think we're on reasonably good ground.

Oh, I do too.  Lori just put me in an anal retentive/pedantic mindset
with talk of unlicensed material.

> So are you genuinely worried about
> the risk of legal proceedings, or is something else bothering you and
> this side thread is just the symptom?

No, no worries.  Intellectual "property" discussions tweak my brain.
I personally think the whole thing is out of balance and the public is
at risk of being catapulted off the scales.  And that lawyers beget
more lawyers.

But I also work for and have interest in a company that has a more
melded view of such things.

> We seem to have quickly veered off
> your original question, which was about providing explicit attribution
> for large works that were incorporated into the documentation.

Right.  Veering back toward pedantic and away from kumbayah, I'm going
to focus on acquisitions documentation.  There's a document on the
wiki titled "The Acquisitions Module Evergreen Release 2.0.0".  It has
an explicit license:

This manual is licensed under the Creative Commons,
Attribution-Share-Alike license.  This document was created by Equinox
Software, Inc. with funding provided by Georgia Public Library
Service.  Any reproductions or adaptations must attribute original
creation of this work to Equinox Software, Inc. and Georgia Public
Library Service.  Any reproductions or adaptations must be distributed
under the same or a similar license.

This document was placed wholesale within the Evergreen documentation,
which of course, was the intention.  The original issue was that the
license was not being met.  The Evergreen documentation merely had a
Copyright (C) The Evergreen Project, which is a non-legal entity
similar to the PostgreSQL Global Development Group.  There was also a
list of participants.

What is happening now (or what I'd like to continue seeing) is some
dialog on how to best fulfill the CC-BY-SA licenses of external
sources that we integrate into the Evergreen documentation.

In the development community this is easy for us, as attribution is an
optional term for the GPL license, and credit for work is easily
determined.  It seems sensible for similar contributions to the
documentation to work with the same sort of no-barrier record keeping.
 But it seems different to me if you're integrating someone else's
work, however licensed.

Before git made it easy for us, I made sure to credit tsbere for any
patch he contributed that I committed.  Everyone else does similarly.
But with documentation, we weren't doing that, and the material is
shared under a license which explicitly cares about attribution.

<re-licensing>
> What are you going to do to help resolve this issue?

I'm going to forget about it. :-)

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Tactical Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com