On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Robert Shiels wrote:
> A lot of you write and distribute free perl code. What do you do about
> copyright and disclaimers in the code itself. I've had a look at a few
> examples and it seems you don't really bother.
>
> I think it is probably worth doing, and we will need one for the
> NotMattsScripts project, so does anyone have a good concise copyright and
> disclaimer notice for free Perl code? I've googled around and can't find
> anything I like.
The simplist would be
# Name - brief description. (c) Copyright 2001 A Nother #
# This is free software available under the same license as perl itself
# This sofwate comes with NO WARRANTY. For more information see URL or
FILE.
The NO WARRANTY bit is fairly important, as is specifiying uunder what
license it is made availab.e - common are Public Doman (not teh default,
default is all rights reserved), BSD & artistic license (fairly
similar) and the GNU GPL and LGPL.
I habitually use the GPL, I have only recently realised how much of a pig
it can be to keep a derived work compliant. It will now take as long to
audit the changes made to mny derived work of mwforum as it did to do some
of the debugging. This is a good thing and a bad thing - It does mean you
keep more control over your work, but at the same time it means that there
is little reward for doing a major piece of work on somebody elses code,
even if you replace 99% of it, its still entirely their copyright and not
yours, so you essentially hand over your moral rights to waht you have
done.
I could be wrong of course - buit that is how it seems.
A.
--
<A HREF = "http://termisoc.org/~betty"> Betty @ termisoc.org </A>
"As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a
complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal
Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)
