DragonFlyBSD

Partially updated; still figuring out the copyright.

On Thu, August 10, 2006 5:16 pm, Victor Balada Diaz wrote:

Hi,

there are 3 patches attached:

book.diff - Updates the copyright info relating to FreeBSD at the header
of the handbook.

The other two are fine, but I'm curious about copyright. Does this have
to be updated continuously as long as there's some FreeBSD material in the
book?

On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 11:21:55PM -0400, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:

On Thu, August 10, 2006 5:16 pm, Victor Balada Diaz wrote:

Hi,

there are 3 patches attached:

book.diff - Updates the copyright info relating to FreeBSD at the header
of the handbook.

The other two are fine, but I'm curious about copyright. Does this have
to be updated continuously as long as there's some FreeBSD material in the
book?

It's not because there are some FreeBSD material there, but because
when I updated the X11 chapter i got material copyrighted in the
last two years.

On Tue, August 15, 2006 5:28 am, Victor Balada Diaz wrote:

It's not because there are some FreeBSD material there, but because
when I updated the X11 chapter i got material copyrighted in the
last two years.

Hmm. This leads me to think of something else. Looking at the legal notice:

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/handbook/LEGALNOTICE.html

"Redistributions of source code (SGML DocBook) must retain the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as
the first lines of this file unmodified."

The original copyright mentioned FreeBSD, not DragonFly. From what I'm
reading, it looks like what we need to to reproduce the FreeBSD license
verbatim, as it's required, and also have a new version to cover our
work.

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 09:17:41AM -0400, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:

On Tue, August 15, 2006 5:28 am, Victor Balada Diaz wrote:

It's not because there are some FreeBSD material there, but because
when I updated the X11 chapter i got material copyrighted in the
last two years.

Hmm. This leads me to think of something else. Looking at the legal notice:

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/handbook/LEGALNOTICE.html

"Redistributions of source code (SGML DocBook) must retain the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as
the first lines of this file unmodified."

The original copyright mentioned FreeBSD, not DragonFly. From what I'm
reading, it looks like what we need to to reproduce the FreeBSD license
verbatim, as it's required, and also have a new version to cover our
work.

Dunno, i'm not a lawyer. Maybe will be best to be on the safe side
and do what you're proposing.

On 2006-08-15 15:17, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:

On Tue, August 15, 2006 5:28 am, Victor Balada Diaz wrote:

It's not because there are some FreeBSD material there, but because
when I updated the X11 chapter i got material copyrighted in the
last two years.

Hmm. This leads me to think of something else. Looking at the legal notice:

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/handbook/LEGALNOTICE.html

"Redistributions of source code (SGML DocBook) must retain the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as
the first lines of this file unmodified."

The original copyright mentioned FreeBSD, not DragonFly. From what I'm
reading, it looks like what we need to to reproduce the FreeBSD license
verbatim, as it's required, and also have a new version to cover our
work.

The biggest problem with that page is that there is no copyright notice
above that statement.

Following the practice found in the code what should be done is to
retain the FreeBSD copyright notice and add a DragonFly notice above or
below (can't find any consistent behavior on which one). Look at
src/sys/i386/i386/identcpu.c and src/sys/i386/i386/machdep.c.

On 2006-08-15 17:49, Erik Wikström wrote:

On 2006-08-15 15:17, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:

Hmm. This leads me to think of something else. Looking at the legal notice:

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/handbook/LEGALNOTICE.html

"Redistributions of source code (SGML DocBook) must retain the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as
the first lines of this file unmodified."

The original copyright mentioned FreeBSD, not DragonFly. From what I'm
reading, it looks like what we need to to reproduce the FreeBSD license
verbatim, as it's required, and also have a new version to cover our
work.

The biggest problem with that page is that there is no copyright notice
above that statement.

Following the practice found in the code what should be done is to
retain the FreeBSD copyright notice and add a DragonFly notice above or
below (can't find any consistent behavior on which one). Look at
src/sys/i386/i386/identcpu.c and src/sys/i386/i386/machdep.c.

Just realized that there's a problem with this. According to Swedish
copyright law (don't know about US but I think this is compatible with
international copyright law) the copyright belongs to the person who did
the last modification. i.e. the copyright of the original belongs to the
FreeBSD documentation project, but when you modify a page the copyright
of the modified page belongs to DragonFly (or whomever).

The problem comes when trying to discern the owner of the copyright of
the whole handbook since (again, Swedish law) the book as a whole can be
considered to be protected. So, the way I see things the copyright of
the whole book belongs to DragonFly, all modified pages belongs to
DragonFly and all unmodified paged still belongs to FreeBSD.

Anyone with a greater understanding of copyright law than me is free to
correct any mistakes I've made.

However this brings the question about whether the FreeBSD copyright
notice from the license text should be included or not. I still don't
believe that it's meant to be copied verbatim but rather updated
whenever changes are made.

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 07:45:45PM +0200, Erik Wikström wrote:

Just realized that there's a problem with this. According to Swedish
copyright law (don't know about US but I think this is compatible with
international copyright law) the copyright belongs to the person who did
the last modification. i.e. the copyright of the original belongs to the
FreeBSD documentation project, but when you modify a page the copyright
of the modified page belongs to DragonFly (or whomever).

This is not exactly true. The Berne convention distinguishes between two
kinds of copyrights in this situation:
- the individual contribution (the part you wrote)
- the collection (the handbook or a specific part of it)

The first part has a fixed owner, it doesn't change when someone else
modifies the handbook. The second part is a bit different though. The
copyright is the sum of all contributors and to simplify the licensing,
e.g. written forms like the FSF is using are common. So, yes the FreeBSD
copyright should be included and a DragonFly copyright be added.

Joerg

On Tue, August 15, 2006 2:52 pm, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:

The first part has a fixed owner, it doesn't change when someone else
modifies the handbook. The second part is a bit different though. The
copyright is the sum of all contributors and to simplify the licensing,
e.g. written forms like the FSF is using are common. So, yes the FreeBSD
copyright should be included and a DragonFly copyright be added.

I'll go forward using this model.

Along those lines, if we bring in a section of documentation (say, for
pkgsrc or rc or etc.) from the NetBSD Guide, we're probably going to have
to explicitly mention their license too.

Anyone have a friend/relative who works in copyright law? I think we're
covering what we need to cover, but none of us are lawyers.

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 11:41:30PM -0400, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:

Anyone have a friend/relative who works in copyright law? I think we're
covering what we need to cover, but none of us are lawyers.

I think that we can send an email to the FreeBSD Foundation. They
have lawyers, and after all, the issue is mostly with FreeBSD.