Licensing SpongeDocs **TRANSLATIONS**

Sponge Docs
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Greetings.

This message is directed to all our Translators at Crowdin. As mentioned at SOS XIII,

We want to re-license the SpongeDocs Translations.

License changes for the SpongeDocs have been proposed (see here).
We’ve had to ask every contributor to approve these license changes. This would protect the master documentation, and provide clear open licensing for anyone who wants to reproduce them. Basically, all that would be required to re-use the docs is attribution and the persistence of the Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. A copy is provided with the PR on GitHub, and also a link to the original on the web.

However, this re-licensing on GitHub does not necessarily extend to the translated Sponge documentation. We must therefore ask all of our translators to approve the same license, so the translated docs can also be future-proofed and share the CC BY-SA logo. This is a bit of a challenge, as we now have 342 translators (not counting me and Sponge).

How?

Can the leaders and proofreaders of our Translation teams assist us in this enterprise?
It seems wise to pursue this on a per-language basis, where each team can see who has actually contributed and help collect approvals for our new license. If you think can help, please reply to this thread, or contact the Docs Editorial Staff on #spongedocs IRC or Discord.

Effectively, each translator (like a contributor) would have to make a declaration that they agree to the re-licensing of their contributions to CC BY-SA, and “sign” with the identity they used to do the translations. We used a template for the master Docs PR, you may wish to do the same.

We plan on sending a global announcement to the SpongePowered Crowdin translators very soon, referring to this Topic and stating the basics of our licensing needs and issues. We should be able to collect many of the approvals we need there, if this goes ahead. We also need to make sure new translators (and those inactive) are shown the license, probably in the text under the project banner on the main page.

Feedback, thoughts, ideas and quibbles would be appreciated. This is complicated, and may take a very long time.

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I can start immediately dispatching messages to all Dutch translators (first via Crowdin after that via other channels) to notify them about this urgent request.

I have one question, do we (the translators) have to ‘put’ our ‘agreement’ on the PR as well?

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So far as I can see, translators don’t have to do anything with the master docs license PR unless they contributed to them. The Translated docs are a different issue. I don’t think having three hundred translators reply to the GiHub PR would be a good idea. We should be able to collect the approvals on Crowdin, although we need to keep a record of it.

Also, I probably wouldn’t describe the issue as “urgent”. It’ll probably take a long time to get it all done, much the same as the original PR is dragging its heels with the last few contributors.

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I would appreciate the attention and participation of @Dannyps, @Lemonous and perhaps @h404bi. As “significant persons” in your particular translation communities, you may be able to help us along here (or at least help us find others who can). Sorry to be a pest. :bug:

There are probably a lot more people I should ping here, before we post this directly to our Crowdin pages. It would help greatly if each language had its’ own volunteer ‘license-wrangler’. Help us out a little here, and pass it on.

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I’ve been a bit distracted, it’s true :blush:

Expect some translations soon!

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It’s been a year or more since I did any translating, and I’m not even sure I got the status on Transifex that I had on CrowdIn. I could try to contact people, however. I assume you want the agreement in English. Would you like mine again for the translation?

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Thanks for the reply, I hadn’t realised you weren’t active there. You do have proofreader status on Crowdin. I’m just trying to offload the workload here a bit, as we have a lot of translators :wink:

I suspect that those who have already agreed to re-licensing on the PR on GitHub can be assumed to confer the same to translations, but it would be good to have it all explicitly agreed. I don’t think agreements have to be explicitly in English (although it would make it easier) as long as we can somehow confirm what they mean. They do have to be a clear agreement to apply CC BY-SA to existing contributions, from the original username.

Lend a hand if you can, but you’re under no obligation.

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The pt-br translation has 8 contributors which 6 of them (including me) actually did translate something. I’ve been the only one active for more than a year, which means it shouldnt be easy to get in touch with the others since they seem to have abandoned the project. I’ll try my best.

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Thanks for the assessment (and the ongoing translations!). We will work with what we have, and I suspect a great deal of patience may be required. In the long term older translations may go out-of-date and disappear, and some may become public domain by default (the work of “Removed Users” on Crowdin).

I did whittle the master Translators list down to about 256 actual contributors, derived from “current words translated” on Crowdin. We are aware that there are a lot of inactive people on the list.

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Surprised that @Inscrutable mentioned me, I joined the SpongeDocs translation community at June 2015. Though now sometimes I still do some translating, I think my contributions is not so much that I could be the “significant persons”. Very appreciated!

The Simplified Chinese translation currently is one of the most active translation branch. I think it would be eaiser (or harder? I don’t know) to collect agreement. And I couldn’t know the translators list as I’m actually not a proofreaders, however, I could try to contact people. Besides, does the agreement template has to be in English? just like what @Lemonous said. (oh, I saw the reply below that, :grin:) And it maybe need some tweaks to adapt to the Crowdln situation. For example, change the [developer name] and [GitHub email(s)] to Crowdin related identity:

I, [Crowdin Name (Crowdin ID)] agree to the licensing of my existing and future contributions to SpongeDocs under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA).

I will open a request to other Chinese translators on my best soon.

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Thanks! I have opened a slew of discussion topics on Crowdin to accumulate licensing messages (one for each language). We will track agreements on a table and see how we go.

Your name was mentioned by ustc-zzzz, who is very active, and I saw you had done a lot of translating too. We’re always in need of organised translators to help proofread and manage things. If you have any suggestions for more proofreaders on Crowdin, please let us know.

I’ll send a global message to all translators on Crowdin to bring attention this issue sometime soon.

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I am ustc-zzzz. The latest version of contributor list will be generated soon and I will contact them as much as possible.:grinning:

Indeed, I am not sure that I could contact all the contributors of Chinese Simplified translation (more than 40). If worst comes to worst, I may push new translations to cover old ones whose contributors cannot be contacted.:pensive:

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Indeed, you are the best translator.

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All translators have now been messaged via Crowdin, as the SpongeDocs License PR is ready to be merged. It will have to wait until we sort out what we do about the Translations Licensing.

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IMPORTANT UPDATE:

We are now in the final stages of clean-up for License approval.
We have set a deadline:

November 5th, 2017

The License PR will be merged on the GitHub repo and Crowdin will be purged of unlicensed translations.

Licensing progress on many of the languages is around 80%, but there are many outliers. We want as many as possible to sign on before the final deadline, as we don’t want to lose translations or translators. But it is necessary for all derivatives to comply with our chosen license, and we can only ask translators to agree.

I have sent a message via Crowdin to every translator who has actually done things but not yet signed onto the new CC-BY-SA license. Those in German, French, Dutch and Russian were kindly provided by translators from each of those teams (thank you phit, ST-DDT, RedNesto, tomudding, InterWall). All the other messages were in English. Apologies to anyone who I inadvertently messaged twice, or who has already signed up. Let me know and I’ll correct my data.

A copy of the message follows, for those interested:

SpongeDocs Licensing - Urgent!

Ahoy! We need you! SpongeDocs wants to move to a new license. We chose Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA), you can find the full license at the link below. To move forward, we’ve set a deadline of November 5th, 2017. We urgently need you to agree to our new licensing - or we’ll have to remove your contributions! We really don’t want that to happen, so we’ll give you until November 5th to comply. Please check in and give us your assent ASAP! Sorry for the inconvenience!

Some Helpful Links:
License PR to the master SpongeDocs on GitHub
Sponge Forums (SpongeDocs subforum)
Discord (SpongeDocs channel)
IRC (SpongeDocs): channel #spongedocs on espernet
The original License Request message posted on Crowdin
The CC-BY-SA License

A variation of the above is also the banner message for SpongeDocs on Crowdin at present. When the PR is merged it will be altered to a notification about the presence of the License for new contributors.

If anyone wants to help, either by translating the message and relaying it or trying to contact the remaining translators, the docs team will appreciate it. Comments quibbles and ideas also welcome.

GOOD LUCK SPONGINEERS OF THE WORLD! MAY THE FLARD BE WITH YOU!

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This goes live in a few more hours. Be ready or be FLARD.

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The deed is done, SpongeDocs has a license, and the Translation Purge will commence shortly. Any translation strings submitted by translators who have not agreed to the license will be removed in the near future, allowing for the full international passage of November 5th, and extra slack.

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Is this translation still on-going? I wasn’t part of the language team but as a Chinese translator I am interested in joining in for the contribution.

Will check out…