On 03/18/2010 12:50 PM, Stefan Sels wrote:
Hi,
while updating the man page to contain drizzle instead of mysql I
stumbled about the license header. Nearly all files still credit MySQL
AB (some also Sun Microsystems) for the copyright.
I used the term "drizzle Team" for the manpage, shouldn´t we update this
for all files?
(IANAL)
As I mentioned in the merge request response, there is a problem with
this. There are actually two, which I'll take in reverse order.
First, "drizzle team" isn't anything legal, so it doesn't actually have
the ability to hold a copyright or to grant a license to that
copyrighted work to any way. An assertion of copyright to a work an a
subsequent licensing of that work to another party is pretty meaningless
if a violation of the terms of that license has no party that can bring
suit in its defense in court.
If there were a legal entity, such as "the Drizzle foundation" (similar
to Mozilla or Apache) then this would work, but would require assignment
of copyright, which we are trying to avoid.
Now, for the biggy. The above is moot anyway, because we actually cannot
change the copyright.
In the US, copyright is automatic upon creation. When you create a work,
you have copyright on that work. If you decide to publish that work, you
may then choose to attribute the work as yours and thereby assert that
you are the owner of the copyright to that work.
At the same time, you may choose to state the license terms under which
you are distributing your work and what rights you are granting to
recipients. In the case of the GPL, you state that the recipient of the
work is granted the freedom to modify the work and to subsequently
distribute modified copies as long as the modified copies are also
distributed under the terms of the GPL. You do not, however, transfer
ownership of your work to the recipient in that license, you merely
grant them permission to copy and change the work if certain conditions
are met.
The line in the license:
Copyright (C) 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
is a declaration of copyright ownership by Sun Microsystems. They allow
us to use, modify and distribute copies of the code that they own as
long as we obey the GPL. They have not given the code to us. At best, if
substantial enough changes are made to the file (and by substantial, I
mean changes that constitute code that would, itself, be significant to
copyright) then the author of that code can assert their copyright by
_adding_ a copyright declaration to the code, thusly:
Copyright (C) 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Copyright (C) 2010 Monty Taylor
This is not required, but under some circumstances (out of scope of this
email) is allowed. But in general, even though we have modified the
code, the original copyright and ownership of the original is unchanged.
If we were to change that to just read:
Copyright (C) 2010 Monty Taylor
it would be akin to declaring that I owned the total copyright to the
code, which is just completely untrue.
If you look through the copyright headers of various projects (I
recommend libicu and InnoDB as complex and also subject to lawyers of
very large corporations, you will see this practice upheld.
Specifically, check out the top of plugin/innobase/handler/ha_innodb.cc
and you will see where google is given copyright attribution for the
patches they made to InnoDB)
HOWEVER, neither I nor anyone else involved with this project are
lawyers. None of us are international legal experts - this is all
derived from general practices. If you, or anyone else, for that matter,
disagrees with the above assessment, the Software Freedom Law Center
(SFLC) is a good place to ask legal questions and actually get a truly
valid answer. Also, [email protected] can answer many questions fairly
authoritatively (whether you like the GPL or not, the folks at the FSF
tend to know pretty explicitly what you can and cannot do regarding
things like copyright headers)
The Doxygen file suggests that there is some documentation, but I didn´t
find any. Is there some? The MySQL Reference is not GPL so a sed
/MySQL/drizzle/g will not work with that stuff ...
Nope. We need some new Documentation. If anybody wants to start writing
some...
Monty
_______________________________________________
Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss
Post to : [email protected]
Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss
More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
