[Junta] The copyright assignment for the wiki site

[Harold Ancell]

At 01:04 PM 8/30/2007, Aaron Hsu wrote:

>On Thursday, August 30, 2007, David Rush wrote: 
>
>>Any objections?
>
>Let's just use the RnRS license. It's safer than Public Domain.

Indeed.  A little research on Wikipedia indicated that the
status of public domain in the US for works that are not
cases of lapsed copyrights (e.g. due to the death of the
author a long time ago) is very murky.  There isn't a
clear method for you to place something like this in the
public domain.

We need to at least implicitly retain the copyright, and
make a safe assignment so that others can use our work.

So why don't we go with what I will call the Scheme Community
Standards License (not that we exactly need another FOSS
license, but it exists and could use a name).

And for the site, this language:

  We intend the content of this site to belong to the entire
  Scheme community, and so we grant permission to copy it in
  whole or in part without fee.  In particular, we encourage
  implementors of Scheme to use the content of this site as a
  starting point for manuals and other documentation, modifying
  it as necessary.

Which is just:

  We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme community,
  and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part
  without fee.  In particular, we encourage implementors of
  Scheme to use this report as a starting point for manuals and
  other documentation, modifying it as necessary.

Replacing "this report" with "the content of this site", since
our wiki can't be labeled a "report".

If I hear no objections, I'll make the change late Tuesday,
assuming it doesn't need an administrator to change, in which
case I'll ask David at that time.

If you've contributed content that you intended to be
restricted by the FSF GNU FDL, now is the time to protest, or
to remove such content from the site.

I thank the several people who alerted me to the problems
with assignment to the public domain.

                                        - Harold