-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Anthony Gorecki wrote: > On Sunday, February 13, 2005 11:20 pm, Georgi Georgiev wrote: > >>Well, you could also consider that the ebuilds all belong to the same >>product -- portage tree. They share the same cvs module, to say >>something in defense of this statement. Therefore, a new version of an >>ebuild can be considered to be an update for the "portage tree" product. > > > I am not a lawyer, however I believe that the Portage tree constitutes a > collective work rather than a derivative work. > > As a collective work (being the unitary whole), the snapshots could be > copyrighted in the form you mentioned, but the individual packages would need > to be copyrighted independently. Consider SourceForge: if one were to > assemble all of the resources that it contains into an enormous tarball, it > could be distributed as a collective work, but each of the individual > software applications would still retain their own sets of copyright > information. The same would apply to KDE, and so forth.
On the other hand, consider a single software distribution consisting of multiple source files -- perhaps some are added at a later date to add new features. Not all of the source files may be necessary, but they do add useful things onto the bare-bones package. Also, a collective work generally involves applying some degree of creativity in the choice -- things are chosen for a specific, creative purpose. The less creativity and choice involved, the less likely it truly is a collective work. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFCEFgoXVaO67S1rtsRAuA2AJ4gMwbPRmJ88I8XjFIxf7n1RrAyaQCfRbM8 jusFFGaMUP3yTu4Sbsk7/AM= =JgB7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- [email protected] mailing list
