Re: Why do we list individual copyright holders?
On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 15:41:00 +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Felipe Sateler (2017-12-19 14:20:42)
>> Sometimes the license requires listing the copyright holders. In those
>> cases, the list of holders must be present in the copyright file. In
>> the rest, there is no need to list them. Only the license matters.
>>
>> .oO( should the copyright file be renamed to license to avoid this
>> eternal discussion? )
>
> Tracking copyright holders is an essential prerequisite for tracking
> licensing, because only a license granted by the copyright holder(s) of
> a work is of any use to us (and our users).
I suspect you are setting an impossibly high bar for determining the
license of a work. We can (and do) rely on upstream telling us the truth
when they say the work is of a certain license, and that contributions
from third parties have been accepted under that license.
If what you say were true, no non-trivial piece of software would be
distributable. Is your copyright credited on all the packages where you
have submitted patches? There's plenty of software in the archive where
there is uncredited copyright, and that is not a problem because the
contribution was made under a given license.
--
Saludos,
Felipe Sateler
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