Re: Translation in public license with source code in GPL-2.0-or-after

Petr Pisar <[email protected]> Thu, 9 Jan 2020 10:52:54 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.redhat.internationalization
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Thu, Jan 09, 2020 at 10:26:02AM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Holcroft wrote:
> ABRT dev want to have a different license for translation than the one used
> for the software.
> 
> Their software is GLP 2.0 or after.
> They would like to have some kind of "Public Domain" License for
> translation.
> 
Translation is a derivated work. I.e. if a message in the original language
has some license, then the same license conditions apply to the translated
message.

In this case ABRT would have to stipulate that all the message strings in the
sources are Public Domain while the other pieces of the code is GPL 2.0 or
later.

I find it very inconvenient. Not mentioning that ABRT maintainers would have
to get a permissions for all authors to change the license of the current
messages and translations from GPL 2.0 or later to Public Domain. (Or rewrite
them from the scratch so that they consistute an indepdent work. And that
I personally find infeasible.)

> I never had this situation before and don't know if this is acceptable or
> not.
> 
> According to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing
> It means: "Being in the public domain is not a license; rather, it means the
> material is not copyrighted and no license is needed."
> 
Yes. Public Domain does grant any permissions and hence the default rights
granted by local law apply. Since in some countries default rights do not
comprise the rights to use, modify, distribute etc. as required by Fedora
definition of free software, Public Domain is discouraged because Fedora could
not distribute such work globally.

I rather recommned you and ABRT team to ask at Fedora legal list where you
should get an authoritative answer.

-- Petr

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