Re: Releasing SW under GPL
On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 14:05 -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Justin Pryzby wrote:
> > Some argue
> > that *.h, at least for libraries, have no creative content, or are
> > only API, and thus not copyrightable, but it can't hurt.
>
> If it has no creative content, you really should include a statement to that
> effect. "Written 2005 by Svante Signell; I consider this to have no creative
> content and to be in the public domain." Otherwise later people may assume
> that it does have creative content and that you screwed up and included a
> file without copyright notices by accident....
>
> I know I don't always follow best practices like this because it can be a pain
> to remember to, but it's a good idea.
>
Thank you all for your valuable comments. Should I incorporate the ideas
above for header files? Any recommendation about "GPLv2" vs "GPLv2 or
later", except for the one proposed: Don't use "or later" since these
licence contents are not yet published, hence currently unknown. What
about static strings in header files, that are visible in object files?
Maybe the http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html could be updated
somewhat. There longer text examples than mentioned in this thread are
given. More could be said about Copyright years, etc. Additionally, some
rules on how to incorporate contributed work into the text regarding
copyright (in addition to comments in the code) as well as copyright
statements for pre-GPL releases and post-GPL releases would be valuable.
Thanks,
Svante
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