Re: Various updates to the handbook

[Erik Wikström <erik-wikstrom@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2006-08-15 17:49, Erik Wikström wrote:
> On 2006-08-15 15:17, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:
> > Hmm.  This leads me to think of something else.  Looking at the legal notice:
> >
> > http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/handbook/LEGALNOTICE.html
> >
> > "Redistributions of source code (SGML DocBook) must retain the above
> > copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as
> > the first lines of this file unmodified."
> >
> > The original copyright mentioned FreeBSD, not DragonFly.  From what I'm
> > reading, it looks like what we need to to reproduce the FreeBSD license
> > verbatim, as it's required, and _also_ have a new version to cover our
> > work.
>
> The biggest problem with that page is that there is no copyright notice 
> above that statement.
>
> Following the practice found in the code what should be done is to 
> retain the  FreeBSD copyright notice and add a DragonFly notice above or 
> below (can't find any consistent behavior on which one). Look at 
> src/sys/i386/i386/identcpu.c and src/sys/i386/i386/machdep.c.

Just realized that there's a problem with this. According to Swedish 
copyright law (don't know about US but I think this is compatible with 
international copyright law) the copyright belongs to the person who did 
the last modification. i.e. the copyright of the original belongs to the 
FreeBSD documentation project, but when you modify a page the copyright 
of the modified page belongs to DragonFly (or whomever).

The problem comes when trying to discern the owner of the copyright of 
the whole handbook since (again, Swedish law) the book as a whole can be 
considered to be protected. So, the way I see things the copyright of 
the whole book belongs to DragonFly, all modified pages belongs to 
DragonFly and all unmodified paged still belongs to FreeBSD.

Anyone with a greater understanding of copyright law than me is free to 
correct any mistakes I've made.

However this brings the question about whether the FreeBSD copyright 
notice from the license text should be included or not. I still don't 
believe that it's meant to be copied verbatim but rather updated 
whenever changes are made.

--
Erik Wikström