clicompanion-devs team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/18/2011 05:44 AM, bdfhjk wrote:

> 1. In copyright file we should have informations about all people
> who make even simple change (like paper-cut bug patch) or only main 
> contributors?


I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice.

As I understand it, Debian's approach is that copyright and licensing
needs to be correct per file.  So if one file is legally copyrighted by
8 people, then you have to list all 8 of them in the debian/copyright
when stating who has copyright for that file.  Usually, any one file is
copyrighted by just one or two people, so this is not a major problem.

Every source file needs a licence statement and a copyright statement.
You can check for these in (text) source files using

  licensecheck -r .

at the top of the source tree.

It has generally been "more or less OK" to have small header files leave
out the licence statement and to include a COPYING or LICENSE file
containing the licence that applies to "the whole project"... but it is
clearer and so better to have license and copyright clearly present in
every single file.

In more formal projects, there can be some sort of defined project
policy about copyright; usually if you create a new file full of useful
code, the copyright for that is yours.  Or, you can do what a few really
big projects sometimes do, and require all contributors to sign
paperwork that assigns copyright on all their contributions to a single
entity (usually a non-profit organization).  OpenOffice works that way,
for example.  Or something in between, where significant contributors
are invited to add their names to copyright for the project, etc.

If you just edit a few lines, or mess with whitespace, that's hardly a
significant contribution you need to worry about claiming copyright for.
 If you make a really significant contribution to some part of
clicompanion that radically changes its capabilities, or uses new and
unique approaches that you invented... then ask the current copyright
holders for files you modified about whether they think your work is
sufficiently significant that they want to add you to the copyright
statement.

> 2. When I modyfing code, I should add me as author to file or this
> should be done by another one?


If you make a major contribution (not just a small bug fix or minor
addition) to a project, then if you want to, you can *ask* the current
author(s) if you can add your name.  In some developer communities,
traditionally it is "more polite" to wait, and let the original authors
be so impressed with your contributed work that *they* ask *you* to add
your name to the list of authors :)

I have also seen some projects keep a CONTRIBUTORS file which everyone,
even those who make smaller contributions, can be listed in.

But, at least for code, a list of authors in a header, or an AUTHORS
file or a CONTRIBUTORS file, is not (as far as I know) the same thing as
a copyright statement, and is present for documentation purposes, not
primarily for legal ones.  This is a big difference -- mistakes in
documentation are easily corrected once spotted; mistakes in the legal
stuff tend to result in packages getting rejected by the Debian
FTPmaster.  I have some personal experience with that!

Jonathan