[Clfs-dev] Open Publication License and Copyrights?

[Andrew Bradford]

Why are all the CLFS books covered by the Open Publication license?

LFS itself is under MIT and a CC license, now.  My understanding is that
a license change on copyrighted works requires some kind of sign-off
from all contributors, not just those who's names show up as holding a
copyright on the book (which is a subset of the actual contributors who
actually hold the copyrights).

Also, all books list a small number of people as claiming copyright on
the book, as seen on the main index page.  This isn't really accurate
since each contributor (some of which may not even show up in the git
history due to historic changes from svn to git and cross over from LFS)
actually owns the copyright on their contribution unless copyright
assignment legal documents have been signed (which I'm almost positive
is not the case).  This seems wrong to me.

Finally, on the embedded book, there's just a copyright and no mention
of LFS anywhere any more (one of my recent commits removed the LFS
attributions).  Is this the right thing to do?  Technically the embedded
book is derived from CLFS which is derived from LFS.  But it seems we've
lost some of that derivation history.  If bringing back attribution and
the derived history is a good idea, how should it be done?

What's the right way to fix (assuming it even needs fixing) this?
I don't want to violate someone's copyright, assuming they're claiming
copyright correctly, but I also don't want to use a license that's not
really fit for the purpose.  I also don't want to claim copyright
incorrectly, which it seems all the CLFS books currently do.

-Andrew