On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 23:20 -0400, Richard Kenner wrote: > You don't really need copyright assignment (IE you can go along with > just licenses) unless you plan on suing people over your documentation, > which seems even less likely than suing someone over your code. > > I don't follow. The issue is that somebody claims that the FSF documentation > infringes on their copyright and claims that the disclaimers on the Wiki do > not constitute a contract or license.
This is barely worth explaining, but; Such a claim would be ridiculous to press in spite of a clear and conspicuous notice to the contrary, plus affirmative action on the user to agree to such a disclaimer, such as clicking a button. The case law on this is nowadays enormous. If you want to go ask another lawyer whether they'd feel the same way, ask them. I'm sure they'd give you the same answer *for these circumstances*. In general, you don't get to claim they can't do something when they told you they were going to do it, you said "okay", and then they did it. We have verifiable logs that they clicked the submit button, submitting these changes, on such and such a day, at such and such a time. As for the rest of your views on documentation, you could have said the same thing of managing bug reports under GNATS that were fixed or affected by their code. It was extra work, and a critical part of development, yet people often didn't do it. Did that make people's code contributions "not very valuable"? And are you going to disagree that the problem with that process was not, in fact, the tool being used? Make a process use tools that people don't like, and they won't do it. You can say they aren't very valuable then, but that doesn't actually help you get your project where it wants to go. Your views seem very out of touch with what other projects have found to be useful in producing good documentation in terms of tools and processes.
