On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 12:01:19AM +0000, Mateusz Loskot wrote: > During such process of following/copying, how copyrights should be managed? > what you are calling "copyrights" (i.e., the copyright headers) are legally largely irrelevant. it's merely a claim of copyright. the actual copyright derives from the code's origin, which can be tracked in the git history, and would have to be testified about in court. therefore, these headers are more about giving credit than copyright.
> From experience in other FOSS projects that I'm involved in, > if I followed/copied copyrighted code from file x.cpp while writing y.cpp, > I would have copied the original copyright notice from x.cpp to y.cpp, > and added my own copyright to that in y.cpp. > this is entirely correct. note that the digia copyright can be added indiscriminately, because the CLA grants it to digia. when you are copying code selectively, you would need to check which external contributors had a part in the copied fragments. this is tedious even if you just use git log/blame, and strictly speaking it isn't even sufficient (new code written by one party can still logically derive from another party's work, even in a different file). given the effort involved and the fact that in the end you always end up with an inconsistent mess anyway, there is a certain reluctance to add additional headers for anything that is not "obviously significant". disclaimer: IANAL, this is not digia's official position, blah blah blah ... _______________________________________________ Qt-creator mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/qt-creator
