License Required for Distributing the Translation of CMake Documentation?

Hello CMake Team.

Suppose that I want to distribute a translation project of the CMake documentation on GitHub, should I use the BSD 3-clause license? Or can I use other more/less permissive licenses?

In my planned project, except the POT/PO files generated by Sphinx with Gettext builder, it does not contain any source code from Kitware/CMake. besides, it also contains the CMake/Python files used for automatic building, which are written by myself. And then, I will host the translated HTML files of the Help documentation on GitHub Page or other URLs.

In this situation,

  1. Is it required that I should use the same license as CMake (i.e. BSD 3-clause) use in the repository, and include CMake’s Copyright Information?
  2. If so, where should I paste the Copyright Information?
  3. If not, can I use more permissive licenses (ex. MIT) or less permissive licenses (ex. GPL)?

The BSD 3-clause license covering CMake’s official documentation only requires that derived works mention the copyright notice and license terms of the original work. Each of the official documentation pages contains a copyright notice at the bottom. Presumably each translated page will correspond to an original page, so you should just be able to have a similar copyright notice at the bottom of each page, along with a link to the corresponding original page. Beyond that, you can choose any compatible license for the derived work.

Presumably each translated page will correspond to an original page, so you should just be able to have a similar copyright notice at the bottom of each page, along with a link to the corresponding original page.

  1. The translation files generated by using Sphinx will by default attach the following copyright information at the bottom of each HTML document page:

    image

    So essentially, I don’t need to pay special attention to the copyright information, because Sphinx will handle it for me automatically, right?

  2. As for the links corresponding to the original HTML page, I’m not quite sure how to attach the corresponding link to each HTML page?

  1. Yes.

  2. Nevermind about linking back to the original pages.

1 Like

Hello, CMake Team.

Since the *.pot files generated by sphinx-build command with gettext builder will automatically contains a copyright information at the top of the file by default, I wonder:

  1. whether I should retain it?
  2. could I remove it (if possible)?

based on the 3-Clause BSD license covering CMake’s official documentation.

image

Since those notices are generated by tooling you’re running locally, and not something included in a distribution you’ve received, I think removing or revising them is fine.