[Puppet Users] Copyright on published recipies

Ryan McBride
2008-06-26T04:43:12Z

I''d like to raise an issue I have with many of the collections of
puppet
recipies available online. Many files do not identify the copyright
status of the file, or identify it incorrectly, and this makes it
difficult to use these samples.

Specifically: the puppet wiki states "Copyright ?  2000-2007 Reductive
Labs, LLC." at the bottom of all pages, including sample recipies. But
unless the user has explicitly transferred the copyright to reductive
labs, this is not true. Furthermore, while I believe the intent is for
people to actuall COPY these examples, the there is currently no
permission granted for this.

I think that the policy should be that to include recipes on the puppet
wiki, they MUST be licensed with a license that allows users to copy and
modify them. In this case it is probably simplest to say that all wiki
examples must be licensed under the same license as puppet itself, and
the copyright statement on the wiki should be modified to reflect this.
Someone should also contact the users that submitted the examples on the
wiki and get explicit consent from them (I can do this).


As a more general comment, many of the 3rd-party sample manifests and
modules do not explicitly mention the copyright on the files; others
include what is intended to be a blanket COPYING file or the like in
their root directory, but then include files from other sources that are
under a different license. (For example, people who use DavidS''s
BSD-licensed common module, but then distribute their manifest
collection under a blanket GPL.

Because the general intent is that you could mix and match modules from
different sources in your site''s local manfiest, I think as a best
practice ALL files in a collection should explicitly include at minimum
a copyright notice (such as Copyright 2008 Ryan Mcbride) and a statement
of copyright permission stating which license it is distributed under.

This is in line with the official GNU recommendations in this area:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html,  For BSD licensed files, one
might as well include the whole license in the file, it''s short :-)

-Ryan

--
Ryan T. McBride, CISSP - mcbride@countersiege.com
Countersiege Systems Corporation - http://www.countersiege.com
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