2006/10/4, Judd Vinet <jvinet@zeroflux.org>:
When I see a copyright in a source file that is part of a the entire source code for an autonomous/whole project, I see it as a copyright representing the WHOLE project, not that individual file. Following that logic, if I write a new source file (eg, db.c or whatever) in 2004, I still add the 2002-2004 (C) to it, since the pacman project itself began in 2002.
Approaching this idea from another angle... imagine if all of pacman was in a single .c file. Then it would make perfect sense to keep the copyright from 2002, since that's when the file began? Files are just a way of organizing the code -- the project itself is what I'm considering when I write down those dates.
The AUTHORS (or better yet, CREDITS) file should be used to list all major contributors to a project. That's there so we don't have to amend the copyright headers of all the source files everytime someone makes a contribution. If we amended the copyright headers, then pacman.c would probably have about 30 names at the top of it.
And besides, you talk about "invalid copyrights".... says who? It is completely within legal limits for an author to not be a copyright holder.
Definitely. Some projects require that any patches be submitted with a little email stub that basically says "I give up any rights to this work to the original copyright holder" just to avoid issues like this. The author of the patch is still known, but he/she does not retain copyright rights to it any longer.
Here are my thoughts -- all in all, I would like to retain the copyright to pacman. I worked hard on it for a number of years and I think I deserve it. With that said, people like you, Aaron, Christian, and Aurelien certainly deserve credit for large portions of the code and what it can do today. This is what I want the AUTHORS file to say, and prominently. We can also reference it on the pacman website and in the README file. It is not my intention to hide the fact that I had help with the project, because I did have a lot of help.
But if the day comes where a big decisions needs to be made that only the copyright holder can make, I wouldn't want to be bogged down by a game of who-wrote-what -- I think that could tear the project apart.
Well said, Judd. Authorship and copyright holding are different things. I think most (at least >50%) OSS projects use this aproach to solve copyright issues. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)