On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 12:13:02PM +0300, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not a lawyer, nor I'm strong in interpreting GPL terms
nor me :)
but "one copyright holder - many authors" is common thing in many projects. For example in every source file of SDL (except in those that are just included from other projects) there are the following lines: SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer Copyright (C) 1997-2006 Sam Lantinga And it doesn't matter that some file didn't exist in 1997, and that most of audio code was (and continues to be) written by Ryan Gordon. There are also other contributors, i.e. maintainers of ports for other platforms. But there is a file named CREDITS, where _all_ contributions and their authors are listed, with many thanks to them. And this is just fine, because in other way there wolud be 10-20 lines of copyright info in many files.
good question. i took my ideas from the kernel source, for example: $ grep -c Linus /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/wireless/ipw2200.c 0 so where Linus is not an author, there he isn't listed at all. the situation is the same with MPlayer: $ grep -c Gereoffy libvo/vo_png.c 0 of course maybe all the kernel & MPlayer devs are crazy, but i don't think so :)
As for generating any copyrights info from CVS - then you forget about those who has no acces to CVS but contributed some patches.
the whole issue is about this: Christian and me have no write access to the cvs and our contributions are pushed by others and if they have a good day then they include our names in the cvs log, if they don't have, then they don't even do so udv / greetings, VMiklos -- Developer of Frugalware Linux, to make things frugal - http://frugalware.org