Nicolas Maufrais wrote:
> Hello Christian,
>
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 12:44:56AM +0100, Christian Thaeter wrote:
>> This file is actually mostly rewritten by me so the 'et al.' is only a
>> safety measure, but for other files I don't want to figure who else
>> touched them manually.
>
> Is the 'et al' legal? Couldn't it be, how could I say, "dangerous"? I
> mean, it's safer to get an exhaustive name of the people who
> worked on the file. That's the way it should be done IMO. However, I
> understand you're not sure about who wrote that file apart you...
I am not lawyer while I suspect that the legality of such a clause
depends on the legislation which is applied. But even if it is not valid
it should only invalidate the 'et al.' clause and not the whole license
notice. For the worst case, when it invalidates the whole license
notice, then at least here in germany that means that the license is
void, but copyrights are still at the authors, it will not fall into
Public Domain or such. A potential user has to contact the Authors for
legal licesnse terms.
In the other case I am adding a copyright notice to code which is not
completely written by me, this means if a original author gets upset
because I forgotten to add him, he could probably sue me an claim that I
stole his copyrighted material. With adding a 'et al.' (and this
archived mailinglist thread) I could hopefully convince a judge that my
intention was not to steal code.
Christian
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