[translations] Copyright?

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAko5Z5UACgkQfg6TFvELooQCnQCgwKXzknncX6m8df0uCLI/80M9
E6IAniNRkXjj8cPIRMRmS0rLvgfWv8yb
=O/9K
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----