Re: request-tracker3: licence problem

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org> writes:

> However, I note an interesting problem: The maintainer will not be
> able to send patches sent to the BTS upstream, as he is not the
> copyright holder for those contributions.

I'm not certain most bug-fix patches are copyrightable -- for example,
if an author has typed "if (x = 0) ..." and I fix that to "if (0 == x)
..." then I haven't really contributed anything creative, and I don't
think I own any copyright in the result.

For larger patches, which really do have creative content, this could
be a serious problem.  I imagine that BP would be interested to talk
about this, since sacrificing user bug reports is a serious cost.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu