Calling all Drupal handbook contributors: Announcing Creative Commons licensing

By cel4145 on 8 Dec 2004 at 06:26 UTC

All Drupal handbook contributors have been generous with their time in developing documentation for others to use in the spirt of open source. Drupal needs your help for just a moment with another task: approving a formal, copyleft licensing agreement for the Drupal handbook. A copyleft license would

make clear that Drupal community members can use the documentation in the Drupal handbook in other contexts, such as revising and developing site specific help docs.
allow the integration of already existing Drupal documentation being developed outside of drupal.org by Bryght, CivicSpace, and others.
eliminate potential legal conflicts over rights of use.

Thus, the Drupal handbook is moving to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This will allow anyone to copy, modify, and distribute revised documentation from the Drupal handbook as long as any copy or new version is released under the same license and attributes drupal.org as the original source.

In order to implement this change, Drupal needs the permission of all handbook contributors. If you have contributed any new or revised pages to the Drupal handbook, please notice your agreement to this licensing scheme by logging in and replying to this post. Below is a list which contains the majority of handbook contributors if you are in doubt whether or not you contributed documentation.

Comments

You have my permission. I

sepeck commented 8 December 2004 at 07:14

You have my permission. I actually had thought this was already the case with the contributed documentation, silly me. :)

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Permission granted

Dries commented 8 December 2004 at 08:10

It is much needed so you have my permission.

Permission granted. :)

Junyor commented 8 December 2004 at 08:56

Permission granted. :)

Original Author

Robert Castelo commented 8 December 2004 at 10:46

"Attribution. You must give the original author credit."

You've got my permission.

Just wondering how this license fits with the Drupal workflow?

When somebody does a re-write of somebody elses documentation, and adds their name to the author field, there is no way to credit the original author.

[a.k.a. MegaGrunt]

------------------------------------------
Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training

Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
----

revisions

Bèr Kessels commented 8 December 2004 at 11:25

We can solve that with revisions. Similar to the way wikipedia gives credits to all authors. But lets keep those discussions for later, and this thread for the CC ;)

[Ber | Drupal Services webschuur.com]

licensing page

cel4145 commented 8 December 2004 at 13:47

Ber's right. This can be worked out. Probably something as easy adding something to accompany a licensing notice both in the handbook and in the administrative help section of Drupal which says that contributors are listed on a licensing page in the Drupal handbook. It would also say that as a condition of contributing, contributors are required to add their name to the licensing page if they want attribution. Then any use of the Drupal handbook docs outside of drupal.org could provide a link to that page.

Problem?

Boris Mann commented 8 December 2004 at 18:23

The list we have -- did that include all the authors of all the revisions? I know that from some recent changes, author has to be changed manually.

Revisions

sillygwailo

Toronto, ON

commented 9 December 2004 at 04:26

I know I've made a revision or two, nothing terribly significant, but nonetheless, I give permission to dedicate to the Creative Commons anything I've written on Drupal.org.

(Username formerly my full name, Richard Eriksson.)

permission granted

Bèr Kessels commented 8 December 2004 at 11:25

I think moving to CC 2.0 is a great step forward and completely agree with my work being licenced as such.

[Ber | Drupal Services webschuur.com]

I know I have done some

gordon commented 8 December 2004 at 11:43

I know I have done some minor amendments, but I am not to sure if they are still there, so just to be on the save side I give full permission.
--
Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting

--
Gordon Heydon

Permission granted.

Steven commented 8 December 2004 at 14:02

Permission Granted

cel4145 commented 8 December 2004 at 14:10

And I will have CC licensed text used in other projects to contribute very soon.

permission granted

moshe weitzman commented 8 December 2004 at 14:13

thanks for taking the lead on this, Charlie.

Permission granted.

Jeremy commented 8 December 2004 at 14:43

Happily.

Permission granted

killes@www.drop.org commented 8 December 2004 at 14:46

--
If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider to file a support request. Thanks.

--
Drupal services
My Drupal services

Permission granted.

drupalwatchdog commented 8 December 2004 at 14:47

CC 2.0 over GNU FDL?

grohk commented 8 December 2004 at 14:53

I would like to start contributing to manuals here since I am finally getting the hang of things, but I do have to wonder why choose to go with the Creative Commons instead of the GNU Free Documentation License?

Update: Never mind, I was confused by the About section of the Creative Commons website saying "If you are interested in licensing software documentation or other supporting text for a piece of code, we recommend the GNU Free Documentation License." However I did some research on this and found that Debian is purging GFDL documents from the main distribution because of problems with the license. Problems with the GFDL are talked about here. I retract my original question.

also there are too many GFDL requirements

cel4145 commented 8 December 2004 at 17:29

Having spent some time looking at the GFDL before, another reason to avoid it are the number of requirements of 'you can do this, but you can't do that" sort of thing. The CC license is just easier to use. It's basically just the GPL for text and other media with an attribution clause.

Simplicity is best, IMHO :)

Agreed.

grohk commented 8 December 2004 at 18:33

You are quite right. The more I read about the GFDL the more I realized that it isn't Free at all in the way the GPL is. What is interesting is that the CC website says that they recommend the GFDL for software manuals, when clearly that isn't the best option.

Code Orange: Drink Your Juice

Permission granted

nedjo

he/him/his

English

commented 8 December 2004 at 17:11

A good move. Thoughts on how this should be handled in future? One approach that occurs to me is a module that enables each node type, or individual books, or taxonomies to be assigned a particular license. Then site users submitting content of that type/book/category would be presented with a mandatory confirmation screen or checkbox on submission, e.g., "I agree to license this submission under the terms of the [license]."

In process

Boris Mann commented 8 December 2004 at 18:19

Ber was working on a cc license module. Moshe volunteered. James is going to help. Contact them to contribute.

Permission granted

jvandyk commented 8 December 2004 at 17:21

Permission granted.

Permission granted

JonBob commented 8 December 2004 at 17:38

Certainly.

me too

al commented 8 December 2004 at 17:39

me too</aol>

permission granted

drumm

he/him

NY, US

commented 8 December 2004 at 18:14

Permission granted

garym@teledyn.com commented 8 December 2004 at 18:35

very good idea, and for future situations we may want to consider placing the CC on all drupal.org page content with a note on the reply/submit forms (esp in the forums) to say "by posting to drupal.org you agree to release your post under the CC terms and conditions"

Backup a Postgresql Database

aam commented 8 December 2004 at 21:10

I posted two comments about making a complete backup of a postgresql database in the Admnistrator -> Backups part of the Handbook: you can include them into the handbook if needed and publish them under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

A good new idea is the backup function in the dba.module, which creates SQL insert statements for a particular database table (and them are readable by all database systems).

AAM: Building the Bridge to Real Content

look at this feature request

bertboerland commented 8 December 2004 at 21:26

here is an old feature request which I have marked as closed just now, take a look at it for more information. imho the CC license should be for all content posted, not just the handbook stuff

--

groets

bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

Yes!

cherylchase commented 8 December 2004 at 22:26

You have my permission.

permission NOT GRANTED

judah commented 8 December 2004 at 23:59

syke. Permission granted

Judah

You have my permission, BUT...

svemir commented 9 December 2004 at 03:41

...only if I actually make a contribution :-)

(well, I did submit a few typo fixes, but Hanbdook was undergoing some restructuring at the same time, so I do not really see them, but that is fine. You even have my permission to NOT publish anything that I contribute :-)

Permission Granted

andremolnar commented 9 December 2004 at 11:52

I only have a few comments on a few pages in the handbook, but I grant permission to those contributions under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.

Andre Molnar

permission granted and more

bryan kennedy commented 9 December 2004 at 15:29

Absolutely! Great work team drupal; thanks for providing leadership in this field. This is just a friendly reminder keep our contributions original. We wouldn't want authors copying content (such as PHP code) from other sources with more strict licensing schemes into Drupal's handbook.

While we are talking about it do people think they would read/participate in a mailing list about the documentation?

mailing list

cel4145 commented 9 December 2004 at 15:54

a while back, Dries started an email list for usability/documentation. it wasn't very active, so it was shut down.

but mailing lists don't have to be as active as say drupal-devel to be useful. even if the list only averaged a few messages a month, i would join it.

and i think it would be useful as a documentation production space. the current process is write documentation and then publish it to drupal.org. that process could be changed to sharing the documentation on the mailing list for feedback before putting it into the production environment on the web.

I'd join too. -- If you

killes@www.drop.org commented 9 December 2004 at 16:39

I'd join too.
--
If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider to file a support request. Thanks.

--
Drupal services
My Drupal services

In progress

Boris Mann commented 9 December 2004 at 19:04

The last message I saw from Dries was that when Kjartan is available, he'll get him to revive/re-create a Drupal documentation mailing list. A post here as well as notice to the devel list will likely be made.

I've also filed a number of issues that apply to documentation:
1. Tracker doesn't show changes to book pages - http://drupal.org/node/13964
2. Style < h2 > tags differently - http://drupal.org/node/13962
3. Style < dl > lists - http://drupal.org/node/13961

#1 is rather critical for keeping up with documentation changes and seems to occur *only* on Drupal.org. I have confirmed that on my 4.5 site, editing other peoples' pages has them show up as new/changed in the tracker. Anyone know if this is a permission setting or something else?

Drupal-docs mailing list

Dries commented 10 December 2004 at 06:48

I setup a drupal-docs mailing list.

permission granted

marky commented 9 December 2004 at 17:08

/marky

Permission Granted

TDobes commented 9 December 2004 at 19:21

Thank you for your work on this; it's nice to see Drupal's documentation receiving increasing attention.

ok with me

kika commented 10 December 2004 at 01:12

and thanks for mentioning my name! :)

Why only the handbook?

Jose Reyero commented 10 December 2004 at 10:43

This is really a good move, but I don't understand why only the 'handbook'.

I think *all* the postings -at least in the future- in drupal.org should be under that license, so you can copy and paste text or maybe include in the handbook materials not primarily intended as 'handbook'.

It is also not clear whether posting a comment on a handbook page is considered part of the handbook itself and means agreement to the licence.

https://reyero.net

agreed

bertboerland commented 10 December 2004 at 10:57

I think many people agree that all content should have the same license. Time to update the T&C module and let all users agree to these terms while / before posting? See also feature req mentioned in this thread somewhere above by me.
--

groets

bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

It would be nice to license

Dries commented 10 December 2004 at 11:40

It would be nice to license all content under CC but getting the handbook licensed under CC is a priority. It's something we'll work on, but not the point of this discussion.

nodes but not comments

cel4145 commented 10 December 2004 at 15:52

I think it's important to be careful about including comments in the "all postings" category. Comments are very conversational, and it could negatively affect discussion about various issues on drupal.org. Some people might necessarily feel uncomfortable knowing that their comments could be copied, revised, and posted elsewhere on the Net. Same with the mailing lists.

That being said, if someone posts a comment to the Drupal handbook that says, "here's something that ought to be included in the handbook page," then that would indicate obvious intent to have the page updated and licensed with their content. Just as when someone contributes code as an example in a project issue or on drupal-devel.

but then...

bertboerland commented 11 December 2004 at 15:59

comments should be nodes...
/me takes cover :-)

btw: I did mean nodes that should be under a CC license, comments shouldnt be perse although I think it is hard to explain to a users what the difference is. So both have the same license.
--

groets

bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

PHP documentation notes as an example

Gábor Hojtsy

he/him

Hungarian

Hungary

commented 12 December 2004 at 13:26

Though this is getting offtopic as Dries pointed out, I would like to mention here that the php.net documentation note submission page has this note on it:

Please note that periodically, the developers may go through the notes and incorporate the information in them into the documentation. This means that any note submitted here becomes the property of the PHP Documentation Group.

Which basically means that content in the notes might get into the manual, and become licensed under the same terms.

disagreed

bertboerland commented 12 December 2004 at 15:58

IMO this is not offtopic, far from it. Making sure that "the current" handbook is under a CC license will solve the incident. Making sure all relevant content is licenced under the same license will solve the problem. The point being that there is no such thing as "the current"handbok with collaborative writing. But I'm fien with taking the first step as long as the next step will be taken and is in the same direction; licensing all content under a cc license.--

groets

bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

right

cel4145 commented 12 December 2004 at 18:12

This is the way that I was thinking, that comments in the Drupal handbook could be worked into the handbook itself if they are obviously meant for developing the content. But that's a different issue than licensing all comments in the handbook, or even the whole site, under CC licensing. I'm in favor of the former, but not the latter, and believe that they can be discussed as separate issues.

a-ha, i didn't see this conversation here

heather commented 14 December 2004 at 13:07

a-ha, i didn't see this conversation here, and asked a similiar question here, in the documentation writer's guide which is now out of date:

How and when do I update a page?
http://drupal.org/node/339

my main concern with comments on the handbook is that people are asking for support forum type questions:
http://drupal.org/node/258#comment-22777

it should be made clear that 'comments' on the handbook should be about the handbook, documentation, etc. and people should be encouraged to ask support questions in the forum. (as well as making clear the licensing for handbook comments, etc)

btw- if i submit anything in the drupal site, i assume it is all free and clear- you can use it any way you like. anything i write in drupal.org is hereby in the public domain, or which ever license you choose.