[pacman-dev] Time for changes

[Roman Kyrylych]

2006/10/4, Judd Vinet <jvinet at 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)