"Simon Marlow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,
> > On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 02:33:20PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> > > Here's a suggestion. Let's modify the BSD license (shock!)
> > to replace
> > > the phrase "the above copyright notice" with "all
> > apropriate copright
> > > notices", and leave the copyright notices in the source files.
> >
> > I had been assuming that modifying the licence required the
> > approval of
> > the University of Glasgow, and that this would take a while.
>
> Simon P.J. suggests an alternative which doesn't involve changing the
> wording of the license: change the copyright notice to read "The
> Univesity of Glasgow and others, named in the accompanying source code
> or other material." (perhaps the wording could be better, but that's
> the best I could come up with for now).
>
> I just noticed that Ross suggested something very similar earlier,
> sorry! However, since we're giving people the option of distributing
> without source code, the copyright shouldn't require the source code to
> be present, hence the phrase "or other material".
Sounds reasonable to me. However, I am not sure whether it
is clear from that license alone that, if source code is not
provided, the names of the copyright holders need to be
transferred to other accompanying material. But this can be
easily solved by having, for each significant portion of
code not owned by the University of Glasgow, either
(a) have an extra LICENSE file in the corresponding
subdirectory or
(b) having the license text in the source file.
This seems like what you described the BSD people are doing.
It, however, suggest that the lines in the module headers
saying
-- License : BSD-style (see the file libraries/base/LICENSE)
should better be simplified to
-- License : BSD-style
as not all modules are really covered by
libraries/base/LICENSE.
To be honest, I am not really sure what collecting all the
license information in one spot is going to buy us. If
somebody really wants to produce a closed-source version of
this code, they are going to have a lawyer having a very
close look at the thing anyway.
BTW, from a legal point of view more copies of the BSD
license with more names in them are actually better. An
author holds the copyright to his or her work by default.
No license means nobody has the right to copy the code, not
the other way around. In other words, I would be worried
about the people who have contributed code and have *not*
put a license explicitly listing their name in.
Cheers,
Manuel
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