Scott Carr wrote:
I don't think that's right. None of the open source licenses have a
requirement to track changes, and there are some very smart lawyers
who have worked on "open source" since before it was called open
source, and none of them have added this sort of requirement to any
FOSS license.
Have you ever tried to submit to the Free Software Foundation?
You are confusing two very different things. The reasons for the JCA are
totally unrelated to the reasons for tracking changes in the PDL. The
fact that the FSF has something like the JCA does not imply that the PDL
is a well-designed license.
Knowing the name of the submitter doesn't help directly, but it does
help to be able to prove something.
But that something is inmaterial to the topic at hand. Knowing the name
of the person who added paragraph 12 doesn't tell you whether he copied
or not.
If two items are similar, as
OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, it IS possible to have sections
that are VERY similar.
Actually, no, their designs are completely different. You are more
likely to win the lottery 3 times in a row than to have two large (ie.
copyrightable) chuncks being very similar.
If you can prove that the OOo version was not
based on the other, then it is possible the court would throw it out.
Knowing the name of the guy who added function xyz does not prove
whether he based it on someone else's code.
This is not true. Microsoft would have to prove that it was copied,
and that the copy was not covered under fair use. If Microsoft did
succeed in doing that, you wouldn't have to take down the whole
document. You'd have to remove the offending section.
I was taking worst case scenario.
What I said is valid in a worst case scenario. In a worst case scenario,
to correct copyright infringement you remove the section that infringes.
Keep in mind that CSV doesn't do anything for us on the PDL. I still
have to go into the document itself and manually update the submission
form with the people that worked on the document.
You can include that information in the CVS comment.
cvs commit -m "Edits by Joe Smith" document.odt
Or you can give Joe CVS access and let him edit himself. Either of these
options is more legally safe than editing by hand.
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
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