[Savannah-register-public] [task #7793] Submission of Opéra Libre

[Sylvain Beucler]

Follow-up Comment #5, task #7793 (project administration):

Hi,

One problem with hosting an opera at Savannah is that we'd need to be
coherent and accept hosting other operas and similar kind of works as well.
However the Savannah team generally does not have licensing experience besides
GPL-compatible applications and GFDL manuals, so this is a field where we're
not really qualified and on which we do not have existing documentation.

I could personaly discuss this issue but I admit I have no experience in
copyright when it's not about software (opera, comic characters, novels... ).
I have some opinions (for example, I do think a performance is a derived work
of the score; on the other hand 3D models are not derived work of Blender,
which is a process manipulating external data without adding parts of its code
in the result 3D model). But again they are just opinions and not something
I'm certain enough about to make decisions about accepting a project or not at
Savannah.

There's also a problem of time, because it currently takes a lot of time to
review projects sent to Savannah and we probably can't affort making decent
licensing research for non-software works.

That's for hosting the project at Savannah - this is more complex than I
first imagined and I don't feel the Savannah staff is up for the job.


Now is the time I can suggest other places to look at.

- Hosting: Savannah is a place where (among others) we educate submitters
about software-related copyright recommended practices and caveats, and as a
result we're picky about what we accept. There are other places where people
will be more liberal. For example, I think http://ourproject.org/ are not
restricting projects to software (there are lot of Spanish people there
though, but not exclusively). Similarly, http://tuxfamily.org/ (more French)
claims to generally support free-as-in-free-speech content.

- Getting advice: you may have heard of the position of some debian-legal
members, who argued that "software" refered to any kind of digital work,
including documentation, resulting in some debates around the compatibility of
the GNU Free Documentation License with the Debian Free Software Guidelines
(all files entering the Debian archive should be compatible with the DSFG).
>From what I could read some debian-legal members have experience outside the
software field, and I know they already discussed the applicability of the GNU
GPL to non-software works. It would probably worth asking there about
licensing an opera - http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/ .

- License: indeed I forgot that CC by-sa didn't distinguish source and
non-source forms. The GNU FDL does have language about "Transparent" and
"Opaque" copies, but you probably already looked at it :)


Regards.


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