[pacman-dev] Time for changes

[Aaron Griffin]

On 10/3/06, VMiklos <vmiklos at frugalware.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 04:29:53PM -0500, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On a side note, something which is rather important, I noticed on
> > quite a few of these files you guys had removed judd's name in the
> > copyright, and added your own.  If I'm not mistaken, this is a rather
> > severe GPL violation - something along the lines of "permission is
> > granted as long as this copyright remains in tact".  Please fix this.
>
> you can find a script called copyright.py in the patch, that was used to
> fix up the copyrights. as far as i know Judd's name was only removed
> where the author of the file was Aurelien or me (like libalpm/server.c)

Does not matter.  The GPL explicitly states that the copyright lines
MUST be maintained.  They were not.

> if you think somewhere it was removed where it should not be, then
> probably the cvs logs are incorrect but feel free to came up with a list
> of "invalid" removes

It should never be removed, according to the GPL.

> adding proper copyright lines are a lot of time and when (according to
> the cvs logs) judd never touched a file, i don't think he should be in
> the copyright list. see the kernel source, you can't find Linus' name in
> every file

Again, this does not matter.  They were there originally.  It is not
about who did what work, it is about changing and explicitly violating
the copyright.

Frankly, I find it rather rude that you guys would go through and say
"whoops, no judd here".  It's not something you do lightly, as it
required you to explicitly go through CVS logs to check.  Even then,
there's alot of changes on files that have no other changes (at least
in this diff) beyond just the copyright notices.

I know people take this stuff lightly, but in reality this is a
crucial point of the GPL.