[smc-discuss] Public statement by Rachana Institute of Typography

[Anivar Aravind]

On Tue, 26 Nov, 2019, 8:00 PM Pirate Praveen, <praveen at onenetbeyond.org>
wrote:

>
>
> On ചൊ, Nov 26, 2019 at 13:48, Anoop Panavalappil
> <anoop at librecode.org> wrote:
> > Agree. The "Credit criteria" should be discussed and agreed upon ASAP.
>
> I don't think we need to limit ourselves to what is required legally. I
> think we can be lenient about giving credits and just credit anyone who
> contributed significantly, by design, coning, ideas, feedback, testing
> or any other means. What is there to lose if we are going beyond what
> is required legally? I don't think there is anything to gain by
> fighting with other Free Software developers over copyright or credits.
>

Praveen Credit/attribution of someis a creative commons school product. It
is more a byproduct of Fair use policies.

Here the question is more on reuse of the code under the free software
licenses . technically it is a copyright claim, but more a way for ensuring
the licenses will be followed correctly while reusing it.

The popular way on Font projects  free licensing these days is not filling
the binaries with long list of names. Instead it will just say

Copyright <year>: <Fontname> Authors . Licensed under SIL OFL <version>

The repo will have AUTHORS file and a CONTRIBUTORS file .

the AUTHORS  file will have Initial Copyright holders (esp, in fonts
designer have a crucial role) .

CONTRIBUTORS file is primarily for everyone who contributed, and want their
name to be included (it can be part of merge requests ) . Significant
contributions can be recognized with inclusion to AUTHORS file by
respective project teams.

The advantage of this approach is contributors can request inclusion easily
by themselves. Dave Cross land had some HOWTO shared earlier sometime
around 2016 related to such practical steps for free font management in
webfont era. Eg. Adding a symbol in some language will be a future one time
contributions in a repo, the project need to record it while maintaining
value of each pieces.


This was planned in 2015 time, but one issue I noticed in repo now is some
fonts (chilanka) says Copyright <fontname> Authors . and there is well
maintained AUTHORS file and empty CONTRIBUTORs file . but License file is
old dated and with names and not referring authors file as I can see. That
is the reason for one confusion as I can see.


So what I am saying in short is follow a method as standard in every repo
and publish clear howto on reusing, with proper license compatibility.

So confusions as we have seen with RIT while reusing the code shouldn't
emerge. Project standard polices should be followed and it shouldn't be
left to a personal threads on licensing and attributing

The whole goal of the effort should be make it easy for people to reuse the
code with all four freedoms for the development of malayalam language (this
answers Nandakumar's question as well)




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