Please document copyright holder[s] and license about documentation HOT 18 CLOSED

Wow, how did I miss the tags here? I concur!

from documentation.

Thanks for you thorough reply!

Sorry for the late response. I had to went upstream and to make sure about the license of the newly added docbook files (similar files existed as MIT and as patched MIT). But all covered now.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice

It's strange that there is so little certainty when it comes to legal issues and open source. When I talked to people working with EFF and FSFE at conferences about licensing stuff they told me "I am a lawyer but this is not my field of expertise."

I just did a little digging in the commit history of this repo and the ones from the very beginning look like this

merged last bits from new_manual
git-svn-id: http://svn.assembla.com/svn/hydrogen/trunk@929 3b3fb362-3133-0410-aa15-cf69e0a59cb7

In addition, amongst the ancient ones of the main Hydrogen repo there are those

merged rev780 with trunk
git-svn-id: http://svn.assembla.com/svn/hydrogen/trunk@795 3b3fb362-3133-0410-aa15-cf69e0a59cb7

Turns out they were both located in a single svn repo and split while migrating to Github. During the process the License file was not duplicated.

So, it should have the same license as the hydrogen repo.

@cme do you agree with this line of argumentation and with me adding notices for GPLv2+ in here as well?

from documentation.

Excellent archaeology!

I guess technically anything added to the github repo isn't explicitly covered by that, but that reduces the number of contributors to us, @mauser, @jeremyz , @trebmuh , @oddtime , @luzpaz , @snan , @rwhogg and @thijz to approve their commits with the license.

from documentation.

What's going on 💁🏻‍♀️

Edit: I changed a few words in the documentation, right? That's fine, I'll sign

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I hereby declare that all my commits are fine to be licensed under a GPLv2+ licence.

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I love GPLv2+ and v3+ 👍🏻👍🏻

from documentation.

I am also okay with GPLv2+.

from documentation.

I am OK with whatever GPL version you choose

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Thank you all for your contributions and for replying in here!

I relicensed the repo as GPLv2+ and as such it will be included in the upcoming 1.2.0 of Hydrogen itself

from documentation.

Oh boy. You right. The repo does not even has a single license notice.

It is also necessary to document the license for these files to be redistributed

Yeah, I'll try to figure out licenses of all resources we didn't created ourselves. But for the overall repo license I'm afraid the formal way is to ask every contributor to agree with using a specific license. And this it's very unlikely for all of them to respond.

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from documentation.

I am also happy, if it is licensed under a GPLv2+ or GPLv3 license.
(I contributed to the Debian packaging.)

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from documentation.

Hey guys,

@theGreatWhiteShark : This is spot on, it happened exactly as you described. I've created that mess when splitting the repos in the process of moving from the SVN repo (hosted at assembla) to github. Sorry to everyone involved for the hassle :-/

I'm totally ok with the re-licensing of my contribution.

from documentation.

Thank you to everyone who replied! :)

@theGreatWhiteShark

Thanks for you thorough reply!

You're welcome, and sorry for the delay in mine. I have an email-centric workflow, and it seems I encountered a notmuch bug where a query was returning a whole thread rather than a list of obsolete drafts when the newest email is not an RFC-compliant email but a draft. The whole thread was deleted :(

Sorry for the late response. I had to went upstream and to make sure about the license of the newly added docbook files (similar files existed as MIT and as patched MIT). But all covered now.

Thank you :)

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice

It's strange that there is so little certainty when it comes to legal issues and open source. When I talked to people working with EFF and FSFE at conferences about licensing stuff they told me "I am a lawyer but this is not my field of expertise."

Agreed. I'm guessing such disclaimers are probably for liability reasons...were someone an expert in open source copyright law, it would also be disadvantageous to give free legal advice, because that would presumably be the basis of their income. Were that person to give free legal advice, maybe it shouldn't be trusted, because such experts might be employed by large corporations looking for loopholes.

I just did a little digging in the commit history of this repo and the ones from the very beginning look like [this]>
[snip]
So, it should have the same license as the hydrogen repo.

Wow thank you! The remaining contributors (with contributions from when the repo was in an undefined state wrt licence?) are @jeremyz, @oddtime, and @thijz. I wonder what the extent of their contributions are?

from documentation.

The remaining contributors (with contributions from when the repo was in an undefined state wrt licence?) are @jeremyz, @oddtime, and @thijz. I wonder what the extent of their contributions are?

@sten0 few features in hydrogen 1.1 for me (mainly the custom pattern length entry, the pan laws in the mixer, the instrument main pitch shift knob). I give my consent to use the type of license the team thinks appropriate. Sorry for the lack of presence in this topic

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Wow thank you! The remaining contributors (with contributions from when the repo was in an undefined state wrt licence?) are @jeremyz, @oddtime, and @thijz. I wonder what the extent of their contributions are?

With oddtime giving his consent only @jeremyz and @thijz are left. Both of them are not just contributors but (former) members of the hydrogen development team with the first one being active already prior to the porting of this repo and license mishap. Jeremy is still online occasionally but there was no sign of life from thijz in years.

I would suggest we wrap things up and relicense the repo to GPLv2+. All "external" contributors have given their consent. The missing members of the hydrogen team worked on both the GPLv2+ licensed Hydrogen project and its documentation (which once was part of the former) and most probably were as unaware of the missing license as the rest of the team until this issue was opened. On the behalf of the whole Hydrogen development team we - all active members - give our consent to relicense this repo to GPLv2+.

@cme and @mauser do you concur?

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@cme @mauser ping

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