[translations] Copyright?

[Mori Sugimoto]

A brilliant answer (on the whole copyright issue) and insight (on
impracticality of removing the notice). Thank you *very* much Larry and
Gerhard!

Cheers,

Mori

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> larry at garfieldtech.com schrieb:
> > 1) Anything in Drupal CVS is under the GPL.  The copyright is held by
> > all kinds of people, but the license is the GPL.  That includes all
> > translatable strings.
>
> > 2) A translation is a derivative work of the work being translated.  In
> > this case, the work being translated is Drupal.
>
> > 3) Derivative works of a GPLed work must be distributed under the GPL if
> > they are distributed.
>
> > 4apply.
>
> > 4a) If that is the case, then neither the original string nor the
> > translation of it are subject to copyright and so a copyright notice is
> > inappropriate.
>
> > 4b) If that is not the case, then the original text is copyrighted its
> > original author and released under the GPL and the translation, as a
> > derivative work, must also be under the GPL.  Claiming a copyright on
> > the translation is valid, but it still must be distributed under the
> GPL.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> > Drupal's CVS policy is to not state a copyright or authorship on
> > anything, since most code gets so many people working on it that
> > separating out who did what is infeasible.  Commit messages should
> > specify credit.  Therefore, po files in CVS should follow the same
> > convention as code: Don't specify an author or a copyright or a license
> > in the file itself and let the packaging system add a LICENSE.txt file
> > as appropriate.
>
> While I agree, this is a bit impractical. The copyright notices in the
> PO files are usually added by the PO translator software. While it is
> possible to remove them (man vi), most translators might not know how.
>
> In fact, our own extractor.php adds this to the header of the files:
>
>     $output  = "# LANGUAGE translation of Drupal (". $file .")\n";
>     $output .= "# Copyright YEAR NAME <EMAIL at ADDRESS>\n";
>
> Since they do not claim something that is not true, I suggest to ignore
> them.
>
> Cheers,
>     Gerhard
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