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Rosetta Code talk:Copyrights: Difference between revisions
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I've found that the book [http://www.scribd.com/doc/103733857/PicoLisp-by-Example picolisp by example] is out and am concerned about the statement of authorship given on the second page as it doesn't mention this sites contributors even partially.
I am also concerned about how difficult they make it to find out such authorship. By selecting just what links they left in the book they make it difficult to track authorship of tasks, but by leaving in external links from this RC site they show that it is possible to leave
What I don't want to do is attribute any malice from the authors in doing this, but I don't think enough attribution has been given to authors and an easy method for that attribution to be found out, i.e. linking to tasks on this site, has been elided. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 06:02, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
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Personally, If they had acknowledged that the task descriptions take time and expertise to create and are NOT authored by them, added an explanation of how to look at authorship through RC page histories and added links to each task page from every task they had used (in the style of some of their RC external links that they have left in), then that may help; but they seem to have concentrated merely on the examples they may have written in PicoLisp and, maybe by ommision, they claim authorship of the task descriptions too. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 10:53, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
: First, chill! Second, I was informed a few weeks ago in IRC, when they asked me for advice wrt copyrights and GFDL. I gave them my understanding of how things work. Second, I was asked to write a forward nine days ago (whereupon I asked for a reminder in nine days, as I was about to have an extremely busy week, fitting 40 hours of work into three days, a wedding and a family emergency) Third, they're not required to give anyone notification, so long as as they conform to the license requirements. Now, they glitched, but it's fixable. Now here's the beauty of it: It's on Github, which means it's eminently reviewable and fixable. Someone reported the copyright glitch to Github, landing them in hot water. So now tempers are high all around. And that makes things difficult. All that's required to get them in conformance is a list of authors of the task ''descriptions'', because it's a given that they already have the copyright over the code examples they're using. I devised a reasonably simple algorithm to come up with the list for a given task. I don't have time to flesh it into code, but I'll drop it into [[Task Description Authors]] as a draft task momentarily.--[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 23:04, 2 September 2012 (UTC).
::Hi Michael, thanks for your explanation. I guess the picolisp authors aren't required to join in this discussion either, which is what I would have preferred.
P.S. doesn't the license state that some attempt at stating authorship needs to be given? --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 10:53, 2 September 2012 (UTC)▼
::If ''they'' had given the site a heads-up before publication then I wouldn't be surprised if RC contributors could have helped them in their endeavours. An announcement by them, with a meaningful sub-heading or a user sub-page off their User page, would have got some attention here, but then, they aren't required to do that either. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 03:45, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
::: I explicitly told them to simply hunker down and code, and that I'd see what I could do on this end. Tempers being as high as they were, it was obvious to me I needed to step in as a moderator/mediator before mixing things up again.
::: They did give ''me'' a heads-up, but I didn't relay the announcement at that time, owing to the extraordinary time crunch I described above.
::: As for whether it was appropriate for them to contact me directly, rather than leaving a note on their user page, the etiquette on that kind of thing is really very unclear. I'm sometimes amazed at how unfamiliar people are with wiki etiquette when I talk with them face-to-face on such things. At the same time, most signs looking for labeled authority on RC lead back to me, so I give the appearance of a single (or, at least, first) point of contact. So perhaps there's a better way for this kind of thing to be handled in the future.
::: I presumed the RC community would still be willing to to lend a hand and get this thing rolling. The infrastructure and effort required to set up a book like this (and the experience gained therefrom) can be turned around and applied to ''every'' language on Rosetta Code, which I saw as a great opportunity to raise awareness of more programming languages, provide more consolidated documentation for some, show off the great work that the RC community as put into creating this corpus, and to highlight editorial need. (Seriously, read through the book; presented in this way, you can see the variance in quality and organization of RC tasks, and it strikes me as a great view to help come up with a better task layout and template.)
::: I really think the RC community should step up and lend a hand, even if only by looking at [[Task Description Authors]] and applying it to each task on RC. The PicoLisp by Example book looks (to me) like a great opportunity to drive improvement on RC, and to bring what we've done to more people (while setting up a framework for doing similar things going forward). --[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 13:51, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
::::Hi Michael, so the two mentioned as authors know about this discussion and just choose to ignore it? It would be good if they joined the discussion and gave their own view. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 03:51, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
▲P.S.
Here is how [http://docs.python.org/py3k/about.html contributors to the Python documentation] are listed. It gives a list of around 230 names and allows for consideration of additions. Nothing like that is done in this PicoLisp book. It seems to belittle the contributors of around a quarter of the text of the book. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 11:09, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
What a great idea. The task that I created when I first came to this wiki, best shuffle, is also in there. Cool! -- To have a long list of contributors and task authors in a book like this, I don't see what purpose that would serve. Nobody cares. [[User:Fwend|Fwend]] 17:53, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
: The problem is that with who-knows-how-many authors in various bits throughout RC, someone ''might'' care. So it's generally best to act on a pessimistic reading. CYA sucks, but it is what it is.--[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 23:04, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
: I find this situation ridiculous.
: You may be technically correct that the book authors should cite original contributors for each task (I'm not even sure about that, GFDL 1.2 doen't seem to say so for ''verbatim copy''), but what a lot of good that will do. Given a task name, it's straightforward to look it up on RC and check its history, and the book makes very clear that RC was the source. I don't think they are obliged to provide a link for each task, which wouldn't make sense in a printed book any way; to satisfy the technicality, they however would have to look through each task's history and figure out who should be classified as its significant contributors, probably ''by hand'' (MikeMol's proposed automation isn't really going to guarantee complete correctness in this department). What would all this undue burden give us? Distracting and goofy attributions like "task originally by Paddy1234" or "by Ledrug" or some such, which neither the book authors nor readers really care -- and those aren't even real names. All this wasted effort, for something one could easily look up in the first place.
: GFDL, CC and various other licenses were designed to promote share and reuse of ideas; getting all worked up as if Abu & Co. were trying to steal your life's work (I'm pretty sure they weren't) is quite contrary to that spirit. Technically it's within your right to demand attribution, but, to me, that doesn't make your desire of being credited wherever possible any less petty.
: (The above are my personal, original opinions; they would normally have been available under the terms of GFDL 1.2 per RC copyright policy, but I hereby release these four paragraphs, including this one, into public domain.) --[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 02:08, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
::I have seen it written that book authorship and where your work has been cited is currency in academia, reviewed in job applications and on promotion boards. In computing, job applicants are told that contributions to open source projects help their case. It would have been polite, when you can look at a page of the book and see a task description longer than the picolisp code and which could have taken more effort to put together than the code, it would have been polite if one had known it was coming.
::I have learned and derived pleasure from writing and modifying task descriptions as well as code. I think its good to see their improvement over time, and think they ''are'' of intrinsic value. I cannot say what individual task authors would think, but with so much of the book being RC stuff not written by the picolisp authors then I would think it was blindingly obvious to someone that has an account on the site enough to write all that picolisp, that discussing the use of such text on the site would be a good idea. But they don't have to, and have (still) chosen not to do that. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 04:27, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
== CC0 or Public domain ==
I've just added a piece of code (and [[Execute_Brain****/Brain****|page]]) that has the CC0 declaration attached. This is a specific grant of public domain status.
As such anyone is legally allowed to slap any license they choose onto it. (this BTW was one of the reasons that the GPL license was created in the first place.)
As I which to comply with the wishes of the original author (although not forced to) I have also copied (added) the CC0 declaration to that page. This legally makes it dual licensed but due to the choice of '''license''' (CC0) the GFDL statement is legally meaningless.
[[User:Rdebath|Rdebath]] ([[User talk:Rdebath|talk]]) 14:00, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
:If it is not your code and the license would be changed, then unless the original license said that you were able to re-license the code then you need to get the original authors permission for a change of license to that used on RC. '''Until then it would be proper to remove the code'''. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] ([[User talk:Paddy3118|talk]]) 16:10, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
::Because it's CC0 (AKA public domain) everyone has permission to change the license; stupid as it sounds. Like I said, this sort of legal stupidity is one of the major reasons that the GPL was invented. [[User:Rdebath|Rdebath]] ([[User talk:Rdebath|talk]]) 18:44, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
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