[Puppet Users] Re: Copyright on published recipies

Luke Kanies
2008-06-30T14:17:43Z

On Jun 25, 2008, at 11:43 PM, Ryan McBride wrote:

> 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).


We need to modify our copyright statements, clearly; I just haven''t
been paying attention to that bit.

Reductive Labs will never claim copyright or ownership of anyone
else''s work, either contributions to Puppet or postings on the wiki.

I expect that a BSD-style license makes more sense for the manifests,
rather than following Puppet''s GPL, but I don''t know how that
meshes
with the non-executable content (which would need something more like
a Creative Commons license, I think).

> 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.

I agree with this.  I''ve tried to make contributions to projects where
the license hadn''t been tracked closely (Ganglia, in particular) and I
couldn''t publish the work in the end because I didn''t know
what
license I should use.

--
If all the world''s a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
     -- Paul Beatty
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com