Thanks (really!)

[Auke Kok]

Zbigniew Łuszpiński wrote:
> I mean author rights. If I explained it wrong - sorry. Lunar is LGPLv2 
> licensed so modules and other pieces of digital work in it.

actually that is completely wrong:

All of the lunar-linux.org build (package management) code is GPLv2. 
LGPLv2 is a completely different license, and does not apply to any lunar 
code. The lunar ISO, moonbase and other works are also licensed under the 
GPLv2. Some non-GPL pieces of code exist due to explicit request or wish 
(like parts of the documentation for instance.)

One thing is arguably copyrightable: modules. Even though you write a 
module yourself, there is no way you can claim copyright over it 
directly. I'd love to give everyone credit but in all honesty it makes no 
sense: your module is a derivative work of both the original authors 
package (who wrote the INSTALL file which exacly describes the way to 
build a package) and the lunar-linux package management code (which is 
(C) by about a dozen people and licensed under the GPLv2). Neither these 
two groups lose their copyright when you write a module.

Now, this has nothing to do with giving tribute to the contributors who 
wrote all these fine modules. But that is a completely different issue. 
Please keep these two issues separate as they upset the discussion.

Now, I am all for giving more credit to contributors, but like always 
don't see a good way of doing this and keeping it up2date. the MAINTAINER 
field was specifically meant for active developers (not contributors), 
which is why we usually strip out the (contributors) email address. This 
puts some extra burden on developers, but pays off a bit since people 
will actually mail to the mailinglist instead of to someone who might not 
have time or has disappeared off the face of the earth. This helps and 
has helped in the past.

My ideas initially and still are to make the lunar-dev mailinglist open 
to non-developers, especially for this group of contributors. However the 
lack of traffic on the lunar mailinglist makes me scared, as people will 
just move their discussions from one list to another, and we again don't 
achieve the goal we want: more people discussing lunar.

I'm in the middle of releasing an ISO here, and will get back tho this later.

sofar