On Mon, 9 Jul 2012 20:52:23 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > On Mon, Jul 09, 2012 at 09:47:40PM +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote: > > > Without proper attribution, e.g. in a commit message [of the merge done by > > a _different_ person] or in the preamble or inline, without a contributor > > explicitly requesting to be credited _anywhere at all_, how to keep track > > of the individual copyright holders who actually do want to keep their > > copyright related rights? How to distinguish from [patch] contributors, > > who don't care and who don't request credits and a copyright notice to > > be added to the file? > > Revision control or some sort of out-of-band tracking. It's the > project's responsibility, not the copyright holder's. That's hardly feasible and not accurate enough either (if it comes to line numbers, changing the RC software, importing from source tarball for a forked project, tracking down when lines get removed or replaced, …). For any code modification, the committer would need to check whether he's about to remove an external person's contribution and then drop that person from the list of copyright holders. [insert Impossible Mission title music here] Inline comments do exist for a very good reason, in particular if the file header contains a copyright notice for the developer of the project and not the contributor(s). And any serious contributor ought to be explicit about whether and where he wants to be credited. The devs explicitly offered me commit access, and it would have been up to me to negotiate changes to copyright notices for work I consider substantial, or to stop contributing because of legal concerns. Patch contributors are free to include changes of existing copyright notices in their patches. -- Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) - Linux 3.4.4-5.fc17.x86_64 loadavg: 0.32 0.51 0.53 -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
