[csw-maintainers] [csw-devel] [PATCH] opencsw-policy: Copyright notice

[Philip Brown]

2011/3/13 Maciej Bliziński <maciej at opencsw.org>:
>
> The vote will:
> Open: 2011-03-13 00:00:00 GMT (ballot already open)
> Close: 2011-03-16 23:59:00 GMT

Please  the cancel this vote, and start it up again in a few days.
There are multiple things wrong with the way you proceeded with this.
1. There was no prior presentation of the ballot, as you just recently
suggested would do for ballots from now on.
  (and the ballot does not look good. I think the "view bio" thing is funky)

2. There wasnt even a "okay lets have a vote on this issue, here's
what I propose it will look like"
3. there is no decent.. or even mediocre.. summary of issues
4. the vote ballot is presented as "approve a patch". This is HORRIBLY
misleading. The vote is really "to determine the license for opencsw
documentation", is it not? And as such, you should be offering
alternative licenses as a choice.

I would like to point out that there was some amount of discussion
already , on the pros and cons of each. Some of the discussion was
quite useful, in my opinion.

It's really "the secretary"s job to summarize this stuff, but in an
effort to assist, I will include a mini-summary of things as I read
them.

First off, a meta-point: I think that *all* votes should have the
highest level purpose clearly stated. so that people know, more than
"what" they are voting for, but *why* it is important for them to vote
in the first place.

Issue: determine a license for opencsw documentation
Purpose: (aka reason _why_ we need to determine a license for all our docs)
   [This part is not clear to me; the closest I have seen from anyone is ,
    "(so that other projects can re-use our documentation)"
   If on the other hand, the purpose is "so that we can freely
cut-n-paste debian policy", then it changes the whole rationale for
the vote. ]

Suggested choices for license:
  BSD style
  GPL

("public domain" or "none" have legal issues making them not a good
choice for european users)

Positives for BSD:  allows maximum sharing/reuse
Negatives:  ?

Positives for GPL:  allows verbatim cut-n-pasting from debian
Negatives:
"The harm is that anyone in the future can't use material from a
GPL incompatible source" ... [and also limits "downstream" sharing of our docs]"