[cairo] Use of the Cairo manual for a PHP extension

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 23:02 +0100, Michael Maclean wrote:
> Together with a couple of other people I've been working on a new Cairo 
> extension for PHP called pecl-cairo, which is approaching the first 
> alpha release. The existing two extensions mentioned in 
> http://cairographics.org/cairo-php/ appear not to have been maintained. 
> This one provides a drop-in replacement for the cairo-wrapper and a 
> similar, though more complete, OO API to the other extension.

Hi Michael,

This sounds great! We're always happy to see usage of cairo growing and
going into new places.

> It will be hosted in PHP's PECL repository[1], and by convention the 
> documentation will become part of the main PHP manual. I would like to 
> base the PHP manual on the main Cairo documention, if possible. Therein 
> lies a problem, however, because the Cairo documentation is licensed as 
> LGPL/MPL, and the PHP manual itself is licensed as Creative Commons 
> Attribution 3.0. As I understand it, those are incompatible, I asked on 
> the IRC channel about this, and cworth mentioned that if we can get 
> agreement from the contributors to the manual it may be possible to make 
> an exception. I'm therefore emailing to see if people have any 
> objections to me doing this. Any opinions are gratefully received.

So nobody has raised objections, but unfortunately with a licensing
issue like this we should be even a bit more careful. I think the next
step is to identify who the actual documentation authors are.

Here's one attempt at doing that. This command gives a list of authors
(sorted by commit counts) by examining only commits that either add or
remove the documentation-start tag (/**):

$ git log -S'/**' | git shortlog | grep '^[^ ]' | sort -n -r -t '(' -k 2 

You can see the output of this command below. Of course, this command
won't catch commits that modify an existing documentation block, but I
would assume that those would likely be fairly trivial touchups not
meriting any copyright protection.

Then, if you want to look at the actual commits for a given author to
decide if they are non-trivial, you could do something like:

git log -p -S'/**' --author="Brian Ewins"

(with any author name, of course).

Then, you'll simply have to decide who has made non-trivial
contributions and get them to agree to relicense their contributions.
You may want to solicit and receive those responses off-list to avoid
noise.

For my part, please consider all of my contributions (past and future)
to cairo's documentation to be made available for use under the Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 license in addition to the licenses of cairo
itself.

So 1 down, 30 to go. :-)

-Carl

Carl Worth (86):
Behdad Esfahbod (46):
Owen Taylor (27):
Vladimir Vukicevic (24):
Chris Wilson (18):
Adrian Johnson (18):
Kristian Høgsberg (9):
Keith Packard (6):
Billy Biggs (4):
M Joonas Pihlaja (3):
Mathias Hasselmann (3):
Emmanuel Pacaud (3):
Søren Sandmann Pedersen (2):
Robert O'Callahan (2):
Brian Ewins (2):
Sylvain Pasche (1):
Søren Sandmann (1):
Peter Weilbacher (1):
Owen W. Taylor (1):
Nis Martensen (1):
Michael Emmel (1):
Jorn Baayen (1):
Joonas Pihlaja (1):
Dan Amelang (1):
Claudio Ciccani (1):
Christian Biesinger (1):
Alp Toker (1):
Azar at .(none) (1):

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