[pacman-dev] Time for changes

[Jason Chu]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006 09:56:41 -0500
"Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/4/06, Douglas Andrade <dsandrade at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/4/06, Essien Ita Essien <essiene at datavibe.net> wrote:
> > > IMOHO, Aaron, since you're right now incharge of the project,
> > > pick one Method and lets us live with it and move on to getting
> > > pacman out the door, its been waaaay too long in development
> > > already i think (though the method you pick does not have to be
> > > the one you really like, considering the work vmiklos and co have
> > > done, in the end, both methods work, various projects use either).
> >
> > +1. I could not say anything better, i make our words mine.
> 
> Well, here's the way I see it.  As with anything copyrighted, one can
> hold the copyright without being a direct author of a given chunk of
> code.  This is deemed a "contribution" of code to the original
> copyright author.
> 
> Since 2002 Judd has held, under the GPL, the copyright for pacman,
> regardless of changes.
> 
> I believe it's viable for contributing authors to copyright their work
> as well.  I feel that it's far more direct to copyright the entire
> program to judd by default (yes, from 2002 as it is based on the
> original pacman).   Sure additional copyright info can be added, but
> judd should remain in place.
> 
> As for the rationale of people commenting on me bringing this up.
> Regardless of _why_ you use free software, the protections given by
> the FSF and the GPL are VITAL.  As for why this was brought up when
> development has been delayed so long - I have received a 34 thousand
> line diff file, of which a large chunk is copyright changes.  I doubt
> anyone would feel comfortable simpl applying to 34 thousand line patch
> without thinking to _any_ code, let alone code they're supposed to be
> responsible for.  One can claim it's easy to "just fix it", but
> honestly, it's just tedious and not inherantly easy.
> 
> As for the claim that CVS is invalid, I am going to claim that, at
> this point, it is not. pacman 3 is a "derivative work" based on the
> original pacman.  The copyright from 2002 still holds.  I will not be
> revoking Judd's copyright, as I believe that is improper.

I'm going to weigh in on this one too.  Hopefully I can add a little
bit more perspective to try and clear things up.

It's not about who thinks who has a copyright, it's about what it
says.

When Aurelien created the file, he probably refactored/copied a bunch
of code from the existing pacman source, so he also included the
copyright notice (albeit adjusted to add himself).  Judd owned the
original copyright and Aurelien added his copyrighted material to also
be considered under the GPL umbrella.

It is not anyone's place to go in and remove the copyright lines of
anyone else unless a) they can prove that that person's copyright was
falsely added (ie. that person owns no copyright over anything in the
file) or b) they are the person and they know they don't own any
copyright to anything in that file.  Option b is a really easy one,
option a is super hard.

The reason that Linus' name isn't in the ipw2200 driver because no one
took any of Linus' copyrighted works and used them.  Linus himself
probably also didn't add any code to that file when it was created.
But if someone went in and removed Linus' name from a file that he did
own a copyright to, would someone raise a stink?

It's not about the final state or who was right or wrong, it's about
the meaning of the change.  What does it mean to take away someone's
copyright claim to something?

Jason
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