Proposal: end Gilligan's Island copyright notices in Fedora docs
by Richard Fontana
Hi,
I think the following issue is partly one of policy so I am first
raising it here. For those who don't know who I am, I am a Red Hat
lawyer and among other things I deal with software and documentation
copyright and licensing issues.
Formal Fedora-branded documentation uses a default legal notice that
among other things uses the following universal copyright notice:
Copyright © <YEAR> Red Hat, Inc. and others.
followed by, typically, a CC BY-SA license notice and some trademark
notice boilerplate.
If I remember correctly, this is implemented via the Fedora Publican
brand package.
This form of copyright notice is found elsewhere in the Fedora
universe, as in the footer of fp.o web pages.
I recognize the convenience of a universal legal notice for purposes
of automating generation of documentation, but there is something
about it that bothers me. Consider two examples: the Fedora 14 Amateur
Radio Guide and the Fedora 15 Musician's Guide. From what I can tell,
the actual authors of these documents are not, and were not at time of
authorship, Red Hat employees. (Moreover, it is not necessarily the
case, in any given situation, that Red Hat would be copyright holder
of all or some of the text even if they had been Red Hat employees,
but for simplicity let's ignore that issue.)
Now, the copyright notice is correct nonetheless because Red Hat holds
copyright on the Fedora logo image, and, as I recall, all
documentation includes some standard language (like the typographical
conventions section) over which, let us assume, Red Hat has some
copyright interest.
Nevertheless, why should a document that was actually written
exclusively by non-Red-Hat employees use "Copyright Red Hat, Inc. and
others" (what a friend of mine has called a "Gilligan's Island
copyright" after the original Gilligan's Island theme song which
famously referred to the important characters of the Professor and
Mary Ann as "and the rest")?
I don't think the Red Hat copyright ownership of the Fedora logo image
justifies the Gilligan's Island copyright notice, as in fact the CC
BY-SA license notice is designed (and perhaps should be improved in
this regard, even though it ought to be obvious) to make clear that
the logo image itself isn't being licensed under CC BY-SA. So if
anything it is the intention for the copyright notice *not* to refer
to the logo. (And, if you want a copyright notice because of the logo,
have a special line saying "Logo copyright <year> Red Hat, Inc.") And
while Red Hat might hold copyright on some small standard portions of
the text, the substantial part of what is creative and expressive in
the examples I gave were written by people unaffiliated with Red
Hat.
So, in the case of at least that subset of Fedora documentation that
is written by those who aren't Red Hat employees (but perhaps, er, the
rest too), what purpose is the Gilligan's Island copyright notice
serving? It doesn't provide the public notice of actual substantial
copyright ownership in at least some cases. It doesn't provide
attribution to the actual human authors. To me, all it really does is
communicate the following:
1) Red Hat has an intimate connection to the Fedora Project.
2) Red Hat is "first among equals" when it comes to attribution for
Fedora project documentation; non-Red-Hat-associated contributors to
Fedora documentation merit only second-class status.
I submit that 1) is already rather obvious to the world and is, if
anything, problematically exaggerated in the public mind. I submit
that 2) is an inappropriate use of a copyright notice even if the
policy were legitimate. Copyright notices aren't supposed to be used
for attribution - I recognize that in free software they often do
serve that purpose - but if they *are* used for attribution,
attribution ought to be given to the human authors. Or to the Fedora
Project as collaborative thing. (A nice thing about CC licenses is
that they decouple attribution from copyright ownership, as in fact
you can see in the default documentation legal notice which states
that attribution is to be given to the Fedora Project -- not Red Hat.)
I submit further that it serves no valid purpose to overemphasize the
degree to which Red Hat is the copyright holder of Fedora
documentation anyway. Fedora contributors do not assign copyright to
Red Hat. If you want to give credit to Red Hat, or overemphasize the
intimacy of the Fedora/Red Hat relationship, do so in some other way:
have a "The Fedora Project is sponsored by Red Hat" line or something
like that (though I don't see the point of that either, and if we
really cared about that I assume we would have had a requirement to
give attribution to Red Hat rather than the Fedora Project).
It may be that the only practical alternative is not to have a
copyright notice at all. That is by no means beyond consideration,
given that copyright notices have rather limited significance anyway.
In the specific examples I noted above, I would say that what little
legal value copyright notices have is not present at all. This could
well be true of other cases.
So I guess I'm interested in knowing whether there is a strong desire
(particularly among those on this list who are not Red Hat employees
yet who have contributed to Fedora documentation) to maintain the
tradition of the Gilligan's Island copyright notice, and whether
alternatives are feasible and preferable. The Musician's Guide shows
that one can prominently credit the principal human author of the
document at the beginning. The Amateur Radio Guide shows that one can
do the same thing but with "The Fedora Documentation Project" as the
author.
If no such strong desire exists, it is my desire to recommend changes
that will eliminate the use of the Gilligan's Island copyright notice
in Fedora documentation.
- Richard
--
Richard E. Fontana
Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel
Red Hat, Inc.
12 years, 10 months
Meeting Summary for 29 June 2011
by Eric Christensen
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
Minutes: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-06-29/fedora_docs.20...
Minutes (text): http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-06-29/fedora_docs.20...
Log: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-06-29/fedora_docs.20...
===================================================================================================
#fedora-meeting: Docs Project Meeting - Agenda: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_Project_meetings
===================================================================================================
Meeting started by Sparks at 23:00:10 UTC. The full logs are available
at
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-06-29/fedora_docs.20...
.
Meeting summary
- ---------------
* Roll Call (Sparks, 23:00:18)
* Follow up on last week's action items (Sparks, 23:05:15)
* ACTION: jjmcd to check with dgrift on Ubuntu migration /
policycoreutils (Sparks, 23:06:28)
* ACTION: jjmcd and rudi to continue to follow up on non-Latin
characters in web (Sparks, 23:06:46)
* ACTION: rudi to continue to follow up on FOP issue (Sparks,
23:07:29)
* ACTION: sparks to work with OLF folks to figure out a good time for
the event. (Sparks, 23:09:35)
* ACTION: sparks to work on teleconference setup for OLF (Sparks,
23:09:50)
* ACTION: sparks to update the Docs list on Docs QA (Sparks,
23:10:03)
* Copyright changes for all guides (Sparks, 23:10:34)
* LINK:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/2011-June/013474.html
(Sparks, 23:10:55)
* Publican/pdf - Build system status (Sparks, 23:23:24)
* Goals for FAD @ OLF (Sparks, 23:25:28)
* LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_@_OLF_2011 (Sparks,
23:25:42)
* Docs QA (Sparks, 23:29:57)
* Outstanding BZ Tickets (Sparks, 23:41:05)
* LINK: http://tinyurl.com/lbrq84 (Sparks, 23:41:15)
* Open floor discussion (Sparks, 23:42:00)
Meeting ended at 23:45:38 UTC.
Action Items
- ------------
* jjmcd to check with dgrift on Ubuntu migration / policycoreutils
* jjmcd and rudi to continue to follow up on non-Latin characters in web
* rudi to continue to follow up on FOP issue
* sparks to work with OLF folks to figure out a good time for the event.
* sparks to work on teleconference setup for OLF
* sparks to update the Docs list on Docs QA
Action Items, by person
- -----------------------
* jjmcd
* jjmcd to check with dgrift on Ubuntu migration / policycoreutils
* jjmcd and rudi to continue to follow up on non-Latin characters in
web
* **UNASSIGNED**
* rudi to continue to follow up on FOP issue
* sparks to work with OLF folks to figure out a good time for the
event.
* sparks to work on teleconference setup for OLF
* sparks to update the Docs list on Docs QA
People Present (lines said)
- ---------------------------
* Sparks (83)
* sgordon (42)
* jjmcd (13)
* jwulf (10)
* nb (3)
* zodbot (3)
* fnadge (2)
* rbergeron (2)
* jhradilek (2)
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12 years, 10 months
Fwd: Appointment to the Fedora Board
by Eric Christensen
Congrats Rudi!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jared K. Smith <jsmith(a)fedoraproject.org>
Date: Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 15:28
Subject: Appointment to the Fedora Board
To: announce(a)lists.fedoraproject.org, Fedora community advisory board
<advisory-board(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
The Fedora Board consists of five elected seats and four appointed
seats. In this elections cycle, there were two openings for appointed
Board seats and three opening for elected Board seats. As part of the
normal Board succession process[0], one Board appointment is made
before Board elections and the other is made after the election cycle.
I'm happy to announce that I've appointed Ruediger "Rudi" Landmann to
serve in seat A3 on the Fedora Board for a full one-year cycle. (See
the Board History[1] page on the wiki for a list of
the various Board seats.) Rudi has been active on the Fedora
Documentation team, and maintains several documentation-related
packages in Fedora. Please join with me in welcoming Rudi to the
Fedora Board.
I'd also like to once again publicly thank those individuals who have
previously served on the Fedora Board for their help and their unique
insight. I'd have a much harder job as the Fedora Project Leader if
it weren't for the great individuals that volunteer to serve our
community.
[0] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/SuccessionPlanning
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/History
--
Jared Smith
Fedora Project LEader
--
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/announce
12 years, 10 months
Problem pulling from the web repo
by Nathan Thomas
Hi guys,
Today I tried pulling from the git repo for docs.fp.org and got the
following error:
$ git pull
remote: Counting objects: 1667, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (267/267), done.
remote: Total 1240 (delta 1208), reused 1005 (delta 973)
Receiving objects: 100% (1240/1240), 1.07 MiB | 194 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1208/1208), completed with 422 local objects.
>From ssh://git.fedorahosted.org/git/docs/web
e33bdff..ab174ad master -> origin/master
error: bad index file sha1 signature
fatal: index file corrupt
I tried to clone a fresh copy of the repo, but that failed too:
$ git clone ssh://nathant@git.fedorahosted.org/git/docs/web.git web
Cloning into web...
remote: Counting objects: 154218, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (27484/27484), done.
remote: Total 154218 (delta 131127), reused 147625 (delta 124561)
Receiving objects: 100% (154218/154218), 1.43 GiB | 873 KiB/s, done.
error: inflate: data stream error (incorrect data check)
fatal: serious inflate inconsistency
fatal: index-pack failed
Last successful pull was about a week or so ago. Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Nathan
--
! Please note my new email address !
My blog: http://afternoondust.wordpress.com
Twitter: nlt_1840
12 years, 10 months
Removing duplicate teams
by Dimitris Glezos
A few months ago, some of the Fedora teams were duplicated to support
Publican's language format (eg. nl and nl-NL).
This support has been available in the Transifex Client for many weeks
now, and Publican projects can simply configure their Tx client to
easily map the Fedora Team languages to their dash format (ie. convert
nl → nl-NL) without requiring to have a duplicated team. This
configuration is stored in the ``.tx/config`` file, so it's going to
be available for all users of the git repos.
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/2011-May/013337.html
http://help.transifex.net/user-guide/client/devel.html#customizing-the-la...
We will proceed in removing all the duplicated teams soon and only
keep the ones the L10n team uses. For example, remove nl_NL and only
keep nl (merge the first members into the latter and remove team).
The following languages will be RENAMED (two-letter teams do not exist):
- zh_CN → zh
- lt_LT → lt
- es_ES → es
- vi_VN → vi
The following teams will be REMOVED (two-letter teams already exist):
- cz_CZ
- it_IT
- jp_JP
- lv_LV
- fa_IR
- ta_IN
- uk_UA
The Docs Project owners can follow something like the following:
1. tx pull --translations (remote nl_NL → local nl_NL)
2. <edit .tx/config file to add mappings>
3. tx push --translations (local nl_NL → remote nl)
4. # tx pull --translations #remote nl → local nl-NL)
Step #1 can only happen before we remove/rename the teams.
If there is a time constraint, or we are missing something, please let us know.
-d
--
Dimitris Glezos
Transifex: The Multilingual Publishing Revolution
http://www.transifex.net/ -- http://www.indifex.com/
12 years, 10 months
For new visitors to Docs
by John J. McDonough
New visitors to Docs should be aware that, as Jared mentioned to Chris,
we are pretty loosely organized, especially right now.
We try to get whatever we can on this list, but most of what happens
goes on in the IRC channel #Fedora-Docs. Unfortunately, the channel is
quiet a lot of the time. Most folks lurk, and only raise their heads
when someone mentions their nick. Also, for some reason, the channel
tends to be really quiet on the weekends.
So if you visit, don't be surprised if it is quiet. Idle for a while
and sooner or later something will happen.
We meet every Thursday at 0001Z (Wedensday evening U.S. time), and there
is an agenda posted (sometimes) at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_Project_meetings
Minutes and a link to the log are always posted on this list.
This is a time between releases, kind of quiet, a good time to get to
know the folks and the processes and be prepared to contribute for
Fedora 16 (although if you want to jump in right now, there is plenty of
Guide work that needs to be done).
We have two slightly different processes; Guides and Release Notes.
Guides generally only need to be updated for each release. Typically,
with the guides we go straight to DocBook. There are usually only one
or two people working on each guide. Since it is usually only updating,
it is a good way to ease into DocBook. Of course, if you have a great
idea for a new guide, then maybe you could be in for a little more work!
Release Notes are entirely new for each release. Because of this we
tend to have a lot of people working on the Release Notes. To make it
easier for newer folks to contribute, and to draw edits from developers
who understand this stuff a lot better than we do, we develop the
Release Notes on the wiki and then convert them to DocBook.
Each contributor typically selects a specific area of the Release Notes
to work on. This is a great excuse to get to know developers working in
an area that interests you. And because the bulk of the work happens on
the wiki, you can put off learning DocBook. In fact, you can be a major
contributor to the Release Notes and never touch DocBook.,
So lurk on the IRC channel, stop by our weekly meetings, and don't be
afraid to dive in. Fedora is a community project, we try hard to be
sure there are no secrets, and everyone's contributions are welcome.
--McD
12 years, 10 months
Self Introduction: Chris H.
by Chris Henchcliffe
Hello,
Allow me to introduce myself to the group:
My name is Chris and I am interested in helping with the Fedora docs
project.
I have extensive experience writing documentation for a variety of end-users
needs, mainly in the Windows environment. I am attempting to broaden my
horizons and learn more about the Linux (Fedora) world.
I am also a technical trainer, having spent the past 10 years specializing
in legal industry applications.
I look forward to working with the group and would be grateful for any
guidance.
Best Regards,
Chris
GPG Information:
email: henchcliffe(a)gmail.com
key ID: E662 BEA2
key fingerprint: EED1 2B39 0A27 F397 D55B AACE 31D9 440F E662 BEA2
12 years, 10 months
[Bug 504066] New: CMS for docs.fp.org
by Red Hat Bugzilla
Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug.
Summary: CMS for docs.fp.org
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=504066
Summary: CMS for docs.fp.org
Product: Fedora Documentation
Version: devel
Platform: All
OS/Version: Linux
Status: NEW
Severity: medium
Priority: low
Component: project-tracking
AssignedTo: kwade(a)redhat.com
ReportedBy: mel(a)redhat.com
QAContact: kwade(a)redhat.com
CC: fedora-docs-list(a)redhat.com
Classification: Fedora
Zikula chosen, working on test instances and project plan with Zikula team
--
Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are on the CC list for the bug.
12 years, 10 months
Re: Proposal: end Gilligan's Island copyright notices in Fedora docs
by Christopher Antila
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Hash: SHA1
Greetings:
I'm glad that we're having this discussion, because there are internal issues
that need to be cleared up *before* they become issues elsewhere.
I hadn't previously noticed the biggest issue here, which is the hypothetical
situation where another group wants to re-use Fedora Docs material. If, for
example, Ubuntu wanted to re-release the Musicians' Guide, they would try to
write a CC-BY-SA attribution statement, and find the following text on the
front page of the Guide:
"Christopher Antila
Fedora Documentation Project
crantila(a)feodraproject.org
- -------------------------------------------------
Legal Notice
Copyright (c) 2011 Red Hat, Inc. and others"
To whom would Ubuntu attribute the document? Reading a little further into the
Legal Notice, we see this:
"The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the Fedora
Project as the "Attribution Party" for purposes of CC-BY-SA."
For me, this clears up the question of attribution. But what of the Red Hat
copyright notice?
I agree that we need a copyright notice, and I suggest that every appearance
of "Red Hat" in the Legal Notice is replaced with something like "Author
Group" or "Authors of This Document," possibly with a hyperlink, but definitely
with an Appendix titled "Author Group" or "Authors of This Document" or
something like that. This allows us to attribute copyright to all contributors
to a document, while at the same time keeping a clean appearance on the front
page. In fact, I'd be happy with entirely removing the list of authors from
the front page.
As for attribution to the Fedora wiki, I wrote this CC-BY-SA attribution
notice into the Musicians' Guide after re-using documentation from elsewhere.
[0] Please feel free to use it as a template, or to ignore it, as desired. (As
an aside, I just noticed poor formatting on that page--shame on me!)
My scholarly "spider senses" suggest that we're actually talking about issues
of communal ownership in an individual-centric society. I'm going to briefly
research how other open-source organizations have solved similar problems,
then post my findings to this list.
Christopher.
[0] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Musicians_Guide/sect-
Musicians_Guide-SC-Basic_Programming-Legal_Attribution.html
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12 years, 10 months
