On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Henning Makholm wrote: > 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. > > 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. In this circumstance, someone would be able to at least make an attempt to e-mail the author and ask if the license really was what the author says it was. If I was building a business or making a serious application that used this code, I would be able to do due dilligance and build upon this code. I wouldn't be able to (safely) do so if the code didn't have an identifiable author. > 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? I'm assuming that the distribution to companies is done legally, in accordance with the license. The question (for me anyway) is that whether or not allowing people to remain anonymous in their distributed contributions is worth the licensing and copyright uncertainty that having an unverifiable author entails. [Think of all the problems we have with non-anonymous authors who have dissapeared from the face of the planet...] I guess we could argue that this is sort of a weaker form of the FSF's policy of copyright assignment, and has a similar motivation that their policy does. [IE, the ability to continue making derivative works with at least a hope of verifying the legality one way or the other.] Anyway, I'm still on the fence on this one. The idea of compelling people to identify themselves doesn't quite sit well with me, but anonymous contributions that are incorporated seem to make for works that are very difficult to modify while avoiding undue liability. Don Armstrong -- Debian's not really about the users or the software at all. It's a large flame-generating engine that the cabal uses to heat their coffee -- Andrew Suffield (#debian-devel Fri, 14 Feb 2003 14:34 -0500) http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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