Eric Kow writes:
> On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 16:16:00 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Well, if the author was intending to public domain his work (not
> being too aware of the implications), I think we should have no
> qualms about replacing the declaration outright.
The problem is that his work is now public domain, and we cannot claim
copyright in it. Also, in many jurisdictions he may maintain a right
to indications of authorship and the like even if he can dedicate all
his economic rights to the public domain. Now, if a later contributor
wishes to maintain copyright in his part, then something like
# Public domain 2010 Petr Rockai
# Portions Copyright 2010 A. Hacker
would be appropriate.
> # Copyright (C) 2010 The Darcs Team
I'm also a little concerned about this. You need a person (corporate
or real) to hold copyright. If you're going to worry about this at
all, you should do it right. If you're not going to worry about it,
then don't; just let individual contributors apply their own copyright
statements however they want and only check that any permission
statement is compatible with the appropriate licenses.
What I have been told by a real lawyer will work well enough is
1. Choose a single license recommended by somebody who knows what
they're talking about (OSI, FSF, and CC come to mind immediately),
and all contributors must agree to it. If the license is
copyleft, you need to decide up front how you want to deal with
licensing changes, and state that in the agreement.
2. All contributors who wish to maintain copyright must insert a
copyright notice in their own name, with the date each
contribution was first published (eg, submitted to the mailing
list or pushed to the main repo).
3. All contributors who wish to dedicate their contribution to the
public domain must insert a dated notice to that effect (with the
date of the PD dedication).
If you want to vary from this simple procedure, and you're serious
about disclaiming warrantee, keeping clear ownership, and protecting
contributors, you probably ought to get legal advice.
Note that my lawyer also recommends getting agreements on paper, if
there's any chance that commercial interests might be involved some
day. Money, and the fiduciary responsibility imposed on hired
managers, makes people do strange thigns sometimes....
IANAL and this is not legal advice even though I did hear it from a
real lawyer.
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