Re: [gentoo-doc] Supporting CC-BY-SA 3.0 and later versions

[Sven Vermeulen]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 10:11:28PM -0500, Mr. Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
> I'm for it, but what's keeping the docs team from just bumping the license
> version?
>
> According to the Gentoo Linux Documentation Project's (GLDP) policy [1], I
> do not have a say in the matter regarding which license the document I
> wrote is published under. This tells me that it's at the will of the GLDP
> whether or not to republish the document under a new license, essentially
> being just pointing `<license />' to the new text.
>
> Which is all fine by me because the document I did write was done under
> the auspices of Gentoo. Meaning I assumed that once GLDP accepted my
> contribution, it then owns the documentation I contributed.

I don't think that's true. As far as I know (I knew European and Belgian law
some time ago, but not using that knowledge clouds it a bit ;-) copyright
has not been transferred as long as this isn't done through a contract of
any kind. There were talks of asking developers to sign such a document, but
afaik this has never been implemented completely (although I know of a few
ebuild developers that did).

What we do is publish documents as allowed under its license, which is
CC-BY-SA 2.5. We are not allowed to change the license, unless the authors
of the document agree.

We *could* ask for all contributors to inform us if they allow their
documents to be licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 but that would be a nightmare to
manage I think.

Supporting <license version="3.0" /> seems like a simple solution to this.

Wkr,
  Sven Vermeulen