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Re: Licensing of translations (problem!)



Hi Peter,

У сре, 24. 09 2008. у 13:02 +0100, Peter Clifton пише:

> W.r.t translation teams. Conflicts of opinion don't seem to have been a
> problem so far. Mostly it has been new translations / completion of old
> unmaintained translations which have been provided through launchpad.

You can feel yourself lucky—I wish you it continues being like that for
you :)

> BTW.. how doesn't this clobber the licensing of strings? Surely upstream
> uploads are all marked as GPL? Is there metadata in the .po files
> tracking the source of the translations?

Well, upstream uploads are marked as upstream, internally in our
database. When it comes to translations, we don't care what exact
license they have (except that it is free software).

> Or, does launchpad choose to declare a translation as BSD licensed,
> launchpad contributed, if it finds the same string / translation in the
> upstream upload and already in Launchpad as BSD? If that were the case,
> I guess over time, strings which are accidentally the same in both end
> up being migrated to BSD licensed equivelants from launchpad.

Exactly.  Basically, we get the one with a more relaxed license, so
people can easily reuse it elsewhere.

> Lets say we do the merging. We then export the translations and check
> the resulting merged translations back into our repository.
> 
> How do we declare the licensing of those files?
> 
> Unless I really misunderstood something, saying BSD & GPL are compatible
> does not mean I can take BSD licensed software / translations, and then
> license it under GPL.

If you want to be more elaborate, I'd say something along the lines of:

  - This entire file can be distributed under GPL license.  Parts of
this file are available under modified BSD license as well.

IANAL, which you can probably tell from the paragraph above. The fact
that some translations are under BSD license is not a very important bit
since you'll be distributing the entire set under GPL.

If it comes to that, we can also dig out which are the exact licenses
which are available under BSD as well, but I don't expect you to have
any problems with this.

See also:
 - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean
 - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

> "
> * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
> * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
> *     * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
> *       notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
> *     * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
> *       notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
> *       documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
> "
> 

Adding the BSD license text somewhere in your project should be
sufficient, if you really want to be on the safe side.  However, I'd not
expect any problems even if you didn't, since the resulting set is going
to end up under GPL anyway.

Again, IANAL.

Cheers,
Danilo






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