On 25 November 2013 09:38, Oswald Buddenhagen <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
You are correct. It's more a convention than legal requirement. >> 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. I see. > 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". Ok, that rationale makes sense to me. The main reason I asked the question about copyright notices in source files is the fact that I follow or copy some *and* I just want to preserve some credits with the spirit of fair play :-) So, I'm more concerned about crediting original authors than about fulfilling legal requirements. Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net _______________________________________________ Qt-creator mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/qt-creator
