Please document copyright holder[s] and license #73
Comments
|
Oh boy. You right. The repo does not even has a single license notice.
Yeah, I'll try to figure out licenses of all resources we didn't created ourselves. But for the overall repo license I'm afraid the formal way is to ask every contributor to agree with using a specific license. And this it's very unlikely for all of them to respond. |
|
Oh boy. You right. The repo does not even has a single license notice.
> It is also necessary to document the license for these files to be
redistributed
Yeah, I'll try to figure out licenses of all resources we didn't created
ourselves. But for the overall repo license I'm afraid the formal way is to
ask every contributor to agree with using a specific license. And this it's
very unlikely for all of them to respond.
1. Translations and documentation are a grey area in licensing, where the
source is often on some kind of web-thing interface; these assets are
then exported to files stored in the VCS of the main project. The
conventional interpretation is that translations fall under the
umbrella of the main project's license, and that contributors of
translations implicitly agree to license their work much as how someone
who submits a PR does not usually need to say "I affirm that my work is
licensed under the same terms as the main project". The same
argument may apply to documentation.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I believe that
that precedent would probably apply to his project in court (with a good,
and expensive lawyer arguing it); however, that's not sufficient to make
these docs available in Debian. To back this option, copy the Hydrogen
license file to this repository, and optionally write a little blurb about
how the docs and translation used to be part of the main project and
inherited its license.
2. If you genuinely can't declare a repository license at this time, then
I'm sad to say
that you've been burned and can't distribute documentation or
translations...and distribution on Github is copyright infringement.
In this case, I think an argument can be made that this licenseless
repository is a "for internal use only" thing, which
would mean it doesn't need a license (once again IANAL ATINLA), then the
only way that you would be able to distribute the translations without
infringing on the copyright
of various contributors
would be by bundling them with Hydrogen, in a release tarball, thus
activating the "umbrella of the main project license". If that's the
case, please release a beta2 tarball with a copy of the contents, including
source, for this repository. Unfortunately for this argument to be
consistent, the repository would need to be made
private, because a stand-alone repository is arguably not under the
umbrella...
Message ID: ***@***.***>
… |
|
Thanks for you thorough reply! Sorry for the late response. I had to went upstream and to make sure about the license of the newly added docbook files (similar files existed as MIT and as patched MIT). But all covered now.
It's strange that there is so little certainty when it comes to legal issues and open source. When I talked to people working with EFF and FSFE at conferences about licensing stuff they told me "I am a lawyer but this is not my field of expertise." I just did a little digging in the commit history of this repo and the ones from the very beginning look like this
In addition, amongst the ancient ones of the main Hydrogen repo there are those
Turns out they were both located in a single So, it should have the same license as the hydrogen repo. @cme do you agree with this line of argumentation and with me adding notices for GPLv2+ in here as well? |
|
What's going on 💁🏻♀️ Edit: I changed a few words in the documentation, right? That's fine, I'll sign |
|
I hereby declare that all my commits are fine to be licensed under a GPLv2+ licence. |
|
I love GPLv2+ and v3+ 👍🏻👍🏻 |
|
I am also okay with GPLv2+. |
|
I am OK with whatever GPL version you choose |
|
I am also happy, if it is licensed under a GPLv2+ or GPLv3 license. |
|
At this point I think several points need to be considered:
1. Contributions from when the documentation was still part of the main
GPL-2+ hydrogen are almost certainly de facto GPL-2+.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
3. Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives currently have Hydrogen without
documentation, and the Debian 12 "Bookworm" freeze is approaching.
4. To resolve this, if a new hydrogen-docs package needs to be
created from this project, then the practical deadline is effectively
the end of November.
5. Alternatively, the problem of missing documentation can be resolved
by creating a new hydrogen 1.2.0 beta2 that includes the source used to
generated the html documentation. The deadline for this will be
January.
I hope it's possible to get the new docs in to the hands of users before
the deadlines :)
|
|
Hey guys, @theGreatWhiteShark : This is spot on, it happened exactly as you described. I've created that mess when splitting the repos in the process of moving from the SVN repo (hosted at assembla) to github. Sorry to everyone involved for the hassle :-/ I'm totally ok with the re-licensing of my contribution. |
|
Thank you to everyone who replied! :)
You're welcome, and sorry for the delay in mine. I have an email-centric workflow, and it seems I encountered a notmuch bug where a query was returning a whole thread rather than a list of obsolete drafts when the newest email is not an RFC-compliant email but a draft. The whole thread was deleted :(
Thank you :)
Agreed. I'm guessing such disclaimers are probably for liability reasons...were someone an expert in open source copyright law, it would also be disadvantageous to give free legal advice, because that would presumably be the basis of their income. Were that person to give free legal advice, maybe it shouldn't be trusted, because such experts might be employed by large corporations looking for loopholes.
Wow thank you! The remaining contributors (with contributions from when the repo was in an undefined state wrt licence?) are @jeremyz, @oddtime, and @thijz. I wonder what the extent of their contributions are? |
@sten0 few features in hydrogen 1.1 for me (mainly the custom pattern length entry, the pan laws in the mixer, the instrument main pitch shift knob). I give my consent to use the type of license the team thinks appropriate. Sorry for the lack of presence in this topic |
With oddtime giving his consent only @jeremyz and @thijz are left. Both of them are not just contributors but (former) members of the hydrogen development team with the first one being active already prior to the porting of this repo and license mishap. Jeremy is still online occasionally but there was no sign of life from thijz in years. I would suggest we wrap things up and relicense the repo to GPLv2+. All "external" contributors have given their consent. The missing members of the hydrogen team worked on both the GPLv2+ licensed Hydrogen project and its documentation (which once was part of the former) and most probably were as unaware of the missing license as the rest of the team until this issue was opened. On the behalf of the whole Hydrogen development team we - all active members - give our consent to relicense this repo to GPLv2+. |
|
Wow, how did I miss the tags here? I concur! |
This repo was once split off the main hydrogen one. But, unfortunately, the copyright file was missed when disentangling the two. With this commit we relicense the Hydrogen documentation under the same license as the main Hydrogen project. All (non-member) contributors gave their consent and the active members of the Hydrogen development team give their consent on behalf of the former/inactive members to whom we have no means of contact anymore. For a detailed discussion see #73. Addresses #73
|
Thank you all for your contributions and for replying in here! I relicensed the repo as GPLv2+ and as such it will be included in the upcoming 1.2.0 of Hydrogen itself |
Please document copyright holders in this git repository. It is also necessary to document the license for these files to be redistributed. Next, a full-text copy of that license will most likely need to be included in the repository (depends on the license).
Finally, it would be nice to see a beta1 tag!
Kind regards,
Nicholas
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: