<posted & mailed> Tommi Vainikainen wrote:
> Hello members of debian-legal, > > It isn't currently well known that Debian website's license is Open > Publication License, which has been judged to be non-free, and > therefore needs to be changed. We know. ;-) > Currently web pages are "Copyright © 1997-2005 SPI" and license terms > linking to Open Publication license are available at > <URL: http://www.de.debian.org/license >. However SPI has not been > collecting any paper work to transfer copyrights like FSF does, and > probably many contributors do not even know about that their work is > automatically copyrighted by SPI. Well, actually, it isn't.... see below. > So basically there is two questions: > > Does missing paperwork create a problem? Yes. In the US, without a paper transfer, copyright is retained by the author (except in work-for-hire cases, which actually might be relevant, but I doubt it). That means that the copyright statements on the web pages are wrong. > And what would be good license for Debians web pages? (This is about > content, the scripts used in generation are GNU GPL or otherwise > freely licensed.) Either GNU GPL v. 2 or 2-clause BSD or MIT/Expat. Author's choice, I think. There is little harm in having different licenses for different web pages. Each time a (manually generated) web page is changed significantly, the copyright statement should be updated and the license agreed to by the new author. > Because copyright is currently claimed by SPI Inc, and SPI's board > meeting is coming rather soon, I brought this issue to SPI's > secretarys attention, but SPI board would appreciate some suggestion > what they should decide about license change. > > I've Cc'ed the bug report about the issue, but Mail-followups does not > contain bug report. Add it if needed, please. -- ksig --random|
