Developers of Sympa

[IKEDA Soji <address@concealed>]

Hi developpers,

We have been preparing a site for documentation on Sympa.  Parts of
them were / will be imported from existing sources.  To finish our
work, we have to solve problem about license.  Would you please give
advice?

Background
----------

Currently, the site includes / is planned to include following
contents.

cf. <https://github.com/sympa-community/sympa-community.github.io>

  1.   /manual/      Administration manual 
  1.1. /manual/man/  Manual pages (generated from PODs)
  2.   /help/        Sympa Help (planned: generated from help bundled in 
Sympa)
  3.   /faq/         Sympa FAQ (planned)
  4.   /community/   Community and support (planned)
  5.   /security/    Security advisories

Most of contents in "Administration manual" were imported from
"Reference manual" on old site: <https://www.sympa.org/manual/>.

cf. <https://sympa-community.github.io/LICENSE.html>

Before we imported them, we asked original authors for permission
to publish their work under new license, CC BY-SA.
Thus, some of contents were not imported because we cannot get
permission by some authors (as we couldn't contact them).  We
rewrote/will rewrite lacked contents from scratch.

Anyway, license of these as open contents is clear.  And there are
no problem on planned content.

# AlexandreFranke, we put your suggestion in practice faithfully
# as much as we can.  Please let us know if you noticed anything.

However, we have problems on "Manual page" and "Sympa Help".
I'll explain them in following sections.


What is appropriate license for these contents?
-----------------------------------------------

PODs and help have been distributed as parts of source distribution,
and it is not so clear whether license(s) is applied to these
documentations themselves.

Logically, GPL (2 or later) may be applied.  However, GPL is
unnatural for documentation.

N.B.: Some PODs (alias_manager(1), archived(1) and bounced(1)) argue
GFDL (1.1 or later), but others don't argue license specific to
documentation.

N.B.: Legal notices on www.sympa.org site does not give us a clue.
cf. 
<http://www.sympa.org/legal_notices#propriete_intellectuelle_droit_de_reproduction_liens>


Can we transfer license? How can we do?
---------------------------------------

If we decided to apply particular license (e.g. CC BY-SA), is it
possible?  If possible, how can we do?

There may be some options:

(1) Get permission by all authors.

  It's _unrealistic_ to get permission by all authors of sources,
  and all translators (note that help is translated by many people).

(2) Argue new license before we get permission by all people.

  It's realistic, but we have to expect plea by some of people.

(3) Don't care.  Never state any licenses on these contents.

  It's easy way, but will cause difficulty in the case of
  redistribution or derived work.


Please give us advice.


Regards,
-- Soji


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