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>>>>> On Wed, 20 Jun 2018, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> Past developers may not be reachable, cooperative, or even alive. |
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> If we need information or assurances from them, we should obtain it |
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> BEFORE we accept commits, not try to chase it down years later. |
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Right, but we can do so only for the future, but not fix any past |
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mistakes. |
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> I'd be interested in any cases where we felt this was necessary. |
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> I know that a lot of work was done recently to try to figure out the |
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> license history of the tree, but honestly I'm not convinced it was |
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> necessary, and legally digging into messy situations can sometimes |
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> even be harmful. In general I think forward-looking solutions tend |
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> to be best unless there is a clear legal duty to look backwards. |
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The tree may be the least of our problems, because all files have a |
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license notice there. |
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For other things like documentation, I had contacted some retired |
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devs. For example, parts of the devmanual were under CC-BY-SA-1.0 and |
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needed explicit relicensing by its author. |
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Another example, a few days ago I stumbled upon this: |
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https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/xml/htdocs/dtd/ |
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(It's in https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/dtd.git/tree/ nowadays, |
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without its history.) |
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Assuming that these files are copyrightable (and I would say so, for |
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a file with 300+ lines and 10 kB size), they should really have a |
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license header. So, should we try to contact all authors, or continue |
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to ignore the issue? (Or even, rewrite everything from scratch?) |
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Ulrich |
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