I don't know about other countries, but in the U.S., a copyright is only
meaningful if assigned to a legal entity, which can be an individual, a
corporation, or an "assumed name" (a person or corporation "doing
business as" an entity.) "TigerVNC Team" has no legal definition under
U.S. law, because it is not registered as an assumed name or corporation.
In terms of giving credit in ReadMe files or About dialogs, it doesn't
really matter. Those copyright messages are more attributions than
assignments, and I think it's fine to use "TigerVNC Team" there.
However, in the banners we add to source files, it's really better to be
specific about who owned the intellectual property of the modification
being made. This would become important if the legality of open
sourcing a particular piece of code ever got called into question.
I looked at the UltraVNC code, and in the ReadMe files, they just print
Copyright (C) 2002-2009 Ultr@VNC Team - All rights reserved
In the About dialog, however, they print the massive historical list.
However, I note that all of the other entries are pre-2002, so they
apparently lump everything after 2002 into "Ultr@VNC Team".
We could do the same for our ReadMe files and About dialogs and lump
everything after 2009 into "TigerVNC Team", i.e.:
Copyright (C) 1998-2009 [many holders]
Copyright (C) 2009-2011 TigerVNC Team
or maybe
Copyright (C) 1998-2011 TigerVNC Team [and many others]
or a middle-ground solution of documenting everything before 2009 and
lumping everything after 2009 into "TigerVNC Team."
My opinion is: let the source files be a record of who contributed
what, and don't try to reproduce that in the ReadMe files. However, I
will go with whatever the majority decides.
On 6/24/11 6:13 PM, Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ) wrote:
> Well, that is the unfortunate problem that TigerVNC has itself in.
> AFAIK, you can still use "Copyright TigerVNC Team" as long as "TigerVNC
> Team is defined, even if it isn't a legal entity, though I don't know
> for sure since I'm not a lawyer.
>
> 2011/6/24 DRC <dcomman...@users.sourceforge.net
> <mailto:dcomman...@users.sourceforge.net>>
>
> That's definitely better than what we do currently, but it still
> requires keeping that file up to date. There are a lot of contributors,
> and it's really difficult to get the list right. The problem you run
> into is that someone gets left out and feels bad because their
> contributions aren't acknowledged. Many times, people contribute
> patches without updating the copyright notice on the file being patched
> (although, technically, you're supposed to do that every time you modify
> something.) Some people are using "Copyright TigerVNC Team", which is
> pretty meaningless, because TigerVNC Team is not a legal entity, the set
> of developers is not really fixed, and three of the four principal
> developers work for companies (Red Hat and Cendio) who own their
> contributions.
>
> It would maybe be good to study what other projects do. I'll take that
> as an action item.
>
>
> On 6/24/11 5:20 PM, Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ) wrote:
> > There needs to be a notice of some kind in order for people who just
> > grab a tarball know who contributed. A CONTRIBUTORS.txt file could work
> > instead. A simple statement could be used in each program
> "Copyright (C)
> > 1999-2011, Copyright owners listed in CONTRIBUTORS.txt" or something of
> > the sort.
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 5:16 PM, DRC
> <dcomman...@users.sourceforge.net
> <mailto:dcomman...@users.sourceforge.net>
> > <mailto:dcomman...@users.sourceforge.net
> <mailto:dcomman...@users.sourceforge.net>>> wrote:
> >
> > Currently, whenever you launch Xvnc or the legacy Unix or new FLTK
> > viewers, they print an outdated copyright acknowledgment:
> >
> > Copyright (C) 2002-2005 RealVNC Ltd.
> > Copyright (C) 2000-2006 TightVNC Group
> > Copyright (C) 2004-2009 Peter Astrand for Cendio AB
> >
> > This needs to be changed or updated. The problem is that the
> actual
> > copyright history is about a mile long (see the new README.txt
> I just
> > added in the top-level source directory.) Thus, I think we
> really need
> > to replace the run-time copyright message with something more
> generic.
> >
> > It's been the convention of the Windows viewer and server for a
> while to
> > say:
> >
> > Copyright (C) 1999-2011 [many holders]
> >
> > That seems somewhat unsatisfying to me, but I can't come up with
> > anything better. Just trying to eliminate the need to maintain
> a list
> > of the copyrights in multiple places. I question whether it's even
> > important to maintain that list in the README files, since it's
> likely
> > to get out of date as well. If people really want to know who
> wrote the
> > code, they can grep the source.
> >
> >
>
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