GPL should preserve BSD copyright notices for GPL's sake.

Posted Sep 13, 2007 19:15 UTC (Thu) by SPM (guest, #47382)
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Regardless of Theo's or the BSD folk's rants, it is important for GPL's sake that all copyright notices are preserved and different authors' code kept separate so that the source and ownership of all the code can be traced. If you think this is not important, look back at the SCO litigation.

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GPL should preserve BSD copyright notices for GPL's sake.

Posted Sep 13, 2007 21:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

The former is worthwhile.

The latter is completely impractical in a project with any number of
authors. What do you do: put a comment beside every single line giving the
initials of the people who worked on it? (Putting a comment at the top of
the file isn't good enough: it doesn't say *which bits* of the file were
changed). Both of these will make the program uglier and ruin automated
merges.

I suppose you could force each author to never modify a file that anyone
else had touched, but that would result in code that had essentially
arbitrary divisions into source files: i.e., an unreadable, unmaintainable
mess. (Because most languages imbue `file scope' with semantics of some
kind, it may actually be impossible.)

In practice this data can only sanely be stored in a version control
system (which is, of course, exactly what happens already). This means you
can't look at a printout and be sure who wrote what, but that's a tiny
price to pay given the enormous costs of working the way you propose.

GPL should preserve BSD copyright notices for GPL's sake.

Posted Sep 15, 2007 13:47 UTC (Sat) by SPM (guest, #47382) [Link]

That is absolute nonsense.

GPL works on copyright GPL work is not public domain uncopyrighted work. You cannot take someone elses copyrighted material and stick a notice on it to say it is your own copyrighted material - if you do, you may find yourself being prosecuted for copyright infringement. That applies to BSD code used in GPLed files as well if you don't follow the BSD license to the letter.

As for manageability of minor changes (eg. a bug fix), you can do what you like with code you use internally but don't distribute. If you are changing part of a line line or a few lines, then if you wish to distribute the code with the original authors code rather than a separate patch, the correct way to deal with this is to submit it to the author/maintainer of the project to incorporate into the original code, so it would go in as a code snippet under the copyright of the author/maintainer - if a number of people can change lines or parts of lines willy nilly within the same file as you suggest, then the project quickly becomes unmaintainable.

You should also note that to be able to claim copyright on something, the work has to be substantial. For example, you can't copyright names, numbers, enumerations, phrases etc, and you are allowed to literally quote short sections from other copyrighted works without infringing copyright. Hence in most cases you can use individual lines of code, header files, variable names and enumerations from someone else's work without infringing the other person's copyright, and by the same measure, you can't claim copyright on a code snippet which is not substantial. Hence the case you are talking about should never arise because code snippets should be passed back as fixes to the original code and go in under the original copyright.

Each author submitting his/her work as a complete file is of course no problem, and where possible (which is in almost all cases), it is best the way to go. If you wish to embed a substantial chunk of code under a different license embedded in another author's BSD code you wrote, then just put a comment around your code with your copyright notice and leave the other authors' copyright notices for the code you didn't write yourself. If you can't be bothered to indicate that the BSD license notice doesn't cover your code block, then just license the whole file under BSD.