Hello, folks.

I am sending this message after having talked to Jan Schaumann about 
copyright notices in htdocs pages (but perhaps the Guide and other 
documentation could also be affected).  The issued came to surface after 
I sent him a diff for Portuguese translation, mostly consisting of 
changes to copyright notice in old pages, which had been left 
untranslated when I first worked on them.

For a number of sensible reasons, Jan suggested that those notices 
should remain untranslated.  However, I have a strong feeling that 
copyright notices are targeted at the reader (so that a casual reader 
won't unconsciously "borrow" copyrighted material from our site, for 
example), and should, therefore, be translated.  On the oher hand, we 
were not absolutely sure that such notices were not there for use by 
authorities in te US, to help enforcing copyright claims, if necessary.

Looking at other translations for examples, we have German and Spanish 
with untranslated notices, but we also have French, that translates not 
only the copyright message, but also "The NetBSD Foundation" (which I 
left like this for Portuguese, since it is a proper name).  I also 
browsed a handful of major brazilian web sites and portals, and found 
copyright notices very similar to those I intended to use.  We agreed 
that common practice would be a positive indication towards translation.

I asked him if this has ever be discussed here.  If it has, there was 
apparently no concensus.  It would be nice iif we could  be consistent 
across different translations, without hurting language/cultural 
pratices, of course.  Besides copyrights, there  are other legalese 
(disclaimers, licenses and others), generally targeted at final users. 
 I cannot see any reason for translating a license and not translating a 
copyright message.

We, therefore, would like to hear from you (especially you with broader 
legal background), in order to be consistent and allows NetBSD to be 
effectively spread to users from every country and language.

-- 
	Pappires

... Qui habet aurem audiat quid Spiritus dicat ecclesiis.