Hi, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Maxim Cournoyer wrote: >> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> >> > On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 12:46 PM Maxim Cournoyer >> > <maxim.cournoyer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> diff --git a/git-send-email.perl b/git-send-email.perl >> >> @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ >> >> # Copyright 2002,2005 Greg Kroah-Hartman <greg@xxxxxxxxx> >> >> # Copyright 2005 Ryan Anderson <ryan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> >> >> +# Copyright 2023 Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@xxxxxxxxx> >> > >> > Let's avoid this change, please. Many people have worked on this file >> > over the years -- often making changes far more substantial than those >> > made by this patch series -- who have not staked such a claim. >> >> I don't mind to drop this hunk if it's unwelcome/not current practice. > > In most open source projects the practice is that only the top one or two > contributors are mentioned. I see. I got used adding copyright lines from contributing to GNU Guix, which retains everyone's minimally substantial changes copyright notices (if they wish), but that's probably not too common, given even the GNU maintainer's manual says [0]: But if contributors are not all assigning their copyrights to a single copyright holder, it can easily happen that one file has several copyright holders. Each contributor of nontrivial text is a copyright holder. In that case, you should always include a copyright notice in the name of main copyright holder of the file. You can also include copyright notices for other copyright holders as well, and this is a good idea for those who have contributed a large amount and for those who specifically ask for notices in their names. (Sometimes the license on code that you copy in may require preserving certain copyright notices.) But you don’t have to include a notice for everyone who contributed to the file (which would be rather inconvenient). [0] https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html >> it's still enough of a change to be protected by copyright though, but >> I don't mind too much. > > My understanding is that your work is protected by copyright laws > regardless of whether or not a copyright notice exists. Not that it > would matter much in practice though, because the cases where copyright > matters in open source projects is very fringe. You are right; written works are automatically protected by copyright. I think copyright ownership would matter in case the copyright holders want to intent legal action against an entity violating the license of the Git project (GPL v2). Hopefully that'll never be necessary. -- Thanks, Maxim
