[SciPy-Dev] I want to do some translation about the SciPy Reference Guide

[Ralf Gommers]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 4:26 PM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 4:04 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 7:38 PM, 江大伟 <zw4131 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi guys
>> > I am a Chinese postgraduate student in the Australian National
>> > University.
>> > And I am using SciPy to develop some machine learning algorithms. But I
>> > found I could not use classes and functions smoothly, because I often
>> > encountered many technical and mathematical words which I could
>> > understand
>> > in Chinese but couldn’t in English. So I was often interrupted when I
>> > was
>> > thinking, which was quite annoying.
>> > So I guess it is absolutely a major stumbling block for other Chinese
>> > students to use SciPy. You can’t expect them to learn English well as
>> > well
>> > as mathematics.
>> > So I want to translate the SciPy Reference Guide into Chinese.
>> > Is it ok? Can you give me some advice or some help?
>>
>> It would be great to have more accessible documentation for Chinese
>> speakers. I would suggest a translation of the first part of the Scipy
>> Reference Guide, the tutorial
>> (http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/tutorial/index.html). The
>> rest of the Reference Guide is autogenerated from docstrings, which I
>> don't think is feasible to translate for several reasons (no toolchain
>> support, not maintainable, too much work). We could distribute the
>> tutorial separately from the rest of the reference guide, this is done
>> for Numpy too.
>>
>> You can find the sources for the tutorial under doc/source/tutorial/.
>> If you think this is the right way to go, it should be easy to jump
>> in.
>>
>
> Is the documentation copyrighted? If not, should it be?

For the BSD license that's not very clear, at least I can't find a
clear explanation anywhere. Several other license include
documentation explicitly, for example the MIT license starts:
"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software")".

I'd guess the docs in the source tree are covered by the BSD license, but IANAL.

Ralf