On Fri, 21 Mar 2008, Markus Neteler wrote:
...
The Geographic Resources Analysis and Support System (GRASS)
Geographic Information System (GIS) is Copyright by the
GRASS Development Team headquartered at the
Open Source Geospatial Foundation, USA.
I was thinking a bit more about this. The original text was:
The Geographic Resources Analysis and Support System (GRASS)
Geographic Information System (GIS) is Copyright by the
GRASS Development Team headquartered at Baylor University,
in Waco, Texas.
which actually made perfect sense: at the time GRASS was first released
under the GPL, the team at Baylor were simply taking the existing public
domain GRASS source, claiming ownership and asserting copyright -
perfectly acceptable as the public domain source was free for anybody to
do anything they wanted with it. I think it's a similar situation to what
Frank did with the original public domain PROJ.4 sources and putting his
name as the copyright holder, purely because he was the one asserting the
copyright when he released them under a new licences.
Since then various people have contributed to GRASS and they own the
copyright over the bits they have contributed, so IMHO the blanket
assertion of copyright by Baylor has not been valid ever since the first
contribution was made by an individual author under the GPL.
I still don't think we should rush into making any changes right now;
there are far more important things we could be spending time on :)
Paul
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