On 29.01.2012 01:10, Stefan Steiniger wrote: > Hei all developers, > > while answering on an email on the JTS list, I saw that for > DeleteDublicateGeometries I am still carrying the copyright although the > class was changed by others (see the header below). > > However, for the test-class it was used: > > Copyright (C) 2012 The JUMP/OpenJUMP contributors > > for those who do not know: keeping the copyright notice apart from the > license notice allows the author to reuse code later in another product > ... you never know ;)
this is plain wrong. a proper copyright notice merely enables you to contact all authors in case you need to (mostly relicensing). >(And this has been important for ISA and will be > probably for the ADBToolbox makers) > > http://www.majordojo.com/2010/07/license-vs-copyright.php this merely explains the difference between license and copyright, which is there and will always be. to put it simple: by contributing under GPL every copyright owner grants the permission to use and modify freely. he in a way waives his rights for usage under the terms of GPL. so if somebody reuses the code under GPL this somebody does not need permision or even know the copyright holder. a bit more precise: every contributor owns the copyright (intellectual ownership) to the code contributed (if created by themselves). interestingly, this copyright actually cannot be sold according to german law but other countries like USA allow this. germany allows the sale of all exploitation rights though. by contributing to a GPL project, the code usually bases on other code of the GPL project, hence the contribution falls automatically under GPL. if this is not the case the contributor should be asked to explicitly license the contribution accordingly. if not done the contribution could be "taken away" again at any time by the copyright holder. having cleared that (re-)usage under the GPL is always fine there is the other case. but reusage in a nonGPL scenario is a totally different issue. you have to ask each and every of the original authors (copyright holder) permission to relicense their work. if cannot get one or two permissions you might be lucky to be able to extract their parts. very often you might not be able to contact everybody because the project is so old and had so many contributors that you will likely have copyrighted work for that you don't know the owner by name. in conclusion: it is not about the product you want to reuse the code but the license the product is under ;) regards ede PS: regarding the notice in the source. i don't care. i would rather call us openjump team now instead of jump pilot, but that's personal preference. generally we should update all java source headers some time and we could do it then. for my contributions i _only_ take the effort to add my copyright if the chunks are big enough. mainly whole classes or extensions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ Jump-pilot-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jump-pilot-devel
