bkuhn shall not be a dictator-for-life, benevolent or otherwise

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

We need to move forward with this project; I have a few details in this
email to talk about doing so.

First of all, thanks to some help from Conservancy's Brett Smith, we've
finally sorted out the issues with k.copyleft.org account creation and it
should be easy to create an account now.  I'll continue to keep the github
mirror at https://github.com/copyleft-org/copyleft-guide up-to-date, but the
Kallithea instance at k.copyleft.org can for the moment remain our canonical
development location [0].

And, related to canonical development: I have been undoubtedly remiss, due
to lack of prioritization, to put sufficient attention into this project.
I've been a needless blocker regarding merging of important typo fixes.  Not
only that, but material that should be in the 'next' branch has been sitting
unmerged on the mailing list and in pull requests for more than a year in
these locations:
       https://k.copyleft.org/guide/pull-request
       https://lists.copyleft.org/pipermail/discuss/2016q3/thread.html

No, I am *not* resigning as editor-in-chief, but I don't think the project
should have an editor-in-chief who is a "dictator for life", benevolent or
otherwise.  This should be a community project to write documentation on
copyleft, and it hasn't been one -- until now.

So, with that, I've today given commit access to the upstream repository to
all those who have affirmatively volunteered to do actual editing: Engel
Nyst, Ben Cotton, and Donald Robertson.  We'll start with these four commit
bits (including me) and see how that goes, but feel free at any point if you
have time and inclination to ask for one.

I am passing out these commit bits with only one simple rule:

   Treat 'master' branch as if by committing there, you have
   single-handledly defined for the world what copyleft is.

I realize that's an overstatement, but I overstate so that no one misses its
importance: lawyers, industry executives, and developers alike have all
linked to and referenced the Copyleft Guide as published on
https://copyleft.org/guide/ and many will treat it as something "official".
For example, I've been quoted parts of the Guide during GPL enforcement
actions.  I also expect that if there's ever another lawsuit about GPL in
the USA in which I'm deposed, I'll see parts of copyleft.org put in front of
me during the deposition.  In short, what's said in the Guide will be
treated as "official" (whatever that means in this context), so anyone with
a commit bit to master should regularly feel the gravity of that fact.

Logistically, note that Buildbot pushes master branch on k.copyleft.org to
that URL once ever 20 minutes or so.  Thus, pushing to the public master
branch means you've basically changed the canonical public document that
everyone links to.

So, for any changes of substance, merge them first to the next branch and
post to this list to discuss what you've merged.  As time goes on and we
have a few examples of such discussions, we'll talk about what community
processes we feel we should honor to merge from next into master.


BTW, https://copyleft.org/guide-next/ exists and is also updated
automatically by Buildbot, so you can still see what it looks like "live" to
make sure formatting is good.


The change to multiple commiters is a big step for this little project
today, but it's the right step.  I have a very demanding and multifaceted
job at Conservancy.  While contributing to copyleft.org is part of that job,
such contribution been low on the priority list for too long for me to
remain a blocker in the project's advancement.  I of course reserve the
right to do the "nasty things" any editor-in-chief might do, such as revert
someone's changes capriciously, rewrite text, and the like, but I'll also
honor the one rule (as above) of merging into master from here on out.


[0] I'm open to bikeshedding about Kallithea.  I only picked Kallithea
    because (a) it is a Conservancy project and (b) it was launched as a
    response to a GPL violation issue, and I liked the idea of hosting a
    copyleft documentation project with a project that was started to
    resolve a GPL violation.  But if Kallithea is not working for us, we can
    switch (although I will refuse to let Github be canonical.)
-- 
   -- bkuhn
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