[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen documentation

[Dan Scott]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 4:07 PM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:
<snip>
>>> Hopefully this is just an oversight and the real intention is to
>>> release the Equinox-derived documentation under the CC-BY-SA license.
>>
>> It's not an oversight.
>>
>> We can, certainly, grant a differently flavored license to the DIG
>> (well, the foundation, I guess) specifically, or provide explicit
>> clarification on points of concern regarding commercial use, if that's
>> the only way DIG will be able to make use of the documentation we
>> produce.  But unless a licensing exception is requested (and, really,
>> all it takes is an email explaining why) we'll be defaulting to the
>> less BSD-like -NC license.
>>
>
> I feel I should clarify the reasons for this decision.
>
> We have, in recent memory, had documentation that we produced and own
> the copyright on taken directly, rebranded to strip all mention of ESI
> -- in the content, copyright notices, everything -- and reused without
> any attribution.  This has happened more than once, and was not
> addressed even after we specifically requested that the we simply be
> credited.  Because our request for simple attribution has not been
> respected, we felt it important to make a clear and strong statement
> that, while everything we produce will be made available to the Open
> Source community for use and reuse, we (all, not just ESI) have to put
> thought explicitly into protecting our rights and being explicit about
> what we will allow by default.

An alternative course of action would be to file a copyright lawsuit
for willfully infringing the terms of your company's use of the
CC-BY-SA license and ignoring your request to come into compliance
with that license. It sounds like a pretty clear copyright violation
to me (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice).

This is analogous to how the Software Freedom Conservancy could file a
lawsuit on Evergreen's behalf if some entity took Evergreen's GPL
code, stripped the copyright & license headers, and didn't comply with
the terms of the GPL.

I, for one, would support your company's defence of its copyright if
you chose to take the infringing party to court. We choose licenses
such as the GPL and the CC-BY-SA because we can create a stronger
product - software and documentation - by working collectively. If
other entities choose to abuse the terms of the licenses that we have
chosen, we should encourage them to come into compliance - and if they
fail to comply, then a lawsuit is a completely reasonable choice of
action.