Re: Need to Identify Contributions and the Dissident Test
Scripsit Don Armstrong <don@debian.org>
> However, an improper copyright + licensing notice could make the
> license itself invalid (or at least questionable) since it wouldn't be
> a clear statement from the copyright holder that they licensed a work
> appropriately.
I don't quite see how the lack of name in the copyright notice can
make any trouble for recipients that does not exist in the first
place. The license only becomes legally relevant if the author
decides to sue somebody for copyright infringement; but to do *that*
he will have to admit (and prove, within some reasonable tolerance of
doubt) that it was he who wrote it.
We might find the author arguing, "I did write this, but I did not put
in the license notice." But that is not really different from the
situation where you write some code and annotate it
Copyright 2005 Don Armstrong. All rights reserved.
and I grab a copy of your source and redistribute it after inserting
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
below your copyright notice. In either case the author will need to
argue that even though he did write the code, the *licence* notice was
added fradulently afterwards by someone who did not hold the copyright.
> However, when you actually distribute the modifications that you've
> made, some sort of disclosure seems necessary so that other people can
> build upon your modifications. If this disclosure isn't provided,
> you've effectively restricted people from using your modifications at
> all,
I'm not convinced that this is true.
> I release a Free work. Someone else comes along, takes the work, makes
> useful modifications to it, and sells it to companies and distributes
> it to the world at large. However, they fail to identify themselves.
> Thus, I have no way of knowing who actually wrote the improvements to
> the work or finding out if the copyright behind them is actually
> sound.
But how would it help you to have a license that required the villain
to identify himself, if he still doesn't? In your scenario, the
villain is *already* breaking the license by selling it to companies
(I assume, in a proprietary version - I also assumed you used some
kind of copyleft). What's to keep him from *also* ditching the
secondary identify-yourself clause?
> In this way, all of the improvements made to the software are
> unavailable to the Free Software community because no one can either
> sue the copyright holder of the improvements to cause them to comply
> with the GPL, or worse, incorporate the improvements back into the
> work.
But if no one can sue them for lack of knowledge who they are, then
having another minor point (the identification requirement) violated
would not make it any easier to sue.
--
Henning Makholm Feet: Store in a cool dry place
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