[Desktop Help] Copyright Issue - Clarification Needed

[Kevin Godby]

First, I agree with Doug and think option 3 (linking to legal.xml) is
the probably the best solution. It means we can consolidate the
attributions, licensing, and copyright information in one file.

Now to address a couple of Ben's points...

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 7:48 PM, Benjamin Kerensa <bkerensa at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> So I think this could be good for more discussion in the past the Doc Team
> has used Creative Commons with attribution to the Doc Team. But we don't do
> a very good job of making contributors aware that their contributions are
> being automatically licensed under the CC while some projects have a
> contributor agreement that outlines such.

I don't think we need a formal contributor agreement. It's generally
understood that if you contribute a patch to a project (whether code
or documentation), you're accepting its inclusion in the project under
the current license.

If our project's licensing terms are unclear, we should rectify that.

> One concern I have had with merging in GNOME doc is that if we transition to
> being our own upstream we will have to rework all of our doc to ensure that
> GNOME contributions do not exist in it or maintain attribution and respect
> any licensing they release their documentation under.

This is true, but I don't see it as a problem. Is this a concern for
you or are you just raising the point?

> Also, contributors come and go from the Documentation Team so how do we
> respect them and attribute them perpetually?

I think using the <credit> tags is fine. For small contributions
(minor edits), it's probably not necessary to list the individual's
name. If someone writes a lot of documentation that gets included in
the system docs, then I don't mind listing them in the <credit>s.
Alternatively, we could generically credit the Ubuntu Documentation
Team and maintain a separate list of the individual team members.
What do you suggest?

—Kevin