Wols Lists 25/11/2010 14:21:
It's tricky, but imho the rule should be if you make a major contribution to a file then you add your copyright notice. In general, patches, fixes, etc shouldn't. And possibly we add a line that says "copyright assorted contributors - see git history for details".
"Major" is quite hard to define, I'd say impossible, given that almost every contry has its own threshold for what is and what isn't a "major change".
My take is: whoever made a commit to a file should be in the list of the authors for a file. There can be problems with people trying to "sneak in the authors' list", as Michael Meeks pointed out. But that is just unavoidable, just be careful with what patches you accept.
Git can help you track down the authors (and there should be automated tools to do that; in my spare time I'm working on one) but there should also be external bookkeepers for pre-git commits and for commits not made by the original author.
BUT. As far as my contributions so far are concerned I don't even know if they are significant enough to be worthy of copyright! If I was asked to assign a licence I would say BSD but even that's overkill for what I think they're worth :-)
That is the exact reason I wanted to use the ISC license. But if somehow that makes things harder to integrate and maintain...
We want to get it right. If not, we could be storing up legal trouble down the line. But at the end of the day, if the consensus is that we want to be an LGPL project, then simply saying "all contributions must be LGPL3+ compatible" keeps us out of trouble. If contributors want to use BSD etc why should we care?
The problems usually arise with the contribution of non-BSD patches on top of BSD patches that are on top of other non-BSD patches. Go figure it out what are you contributing to.
And if third parties want to extract said BSD code, why should we make their life easy (or hard :-) ? If they want the code, it's their problem :-)
I could not agree more ;) -- Gioele Barabucci <gio...@svario.it> _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
