Don Armstrong wrote:
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Willi Mann wrote:Can you explain to me what the consequences of an imcomplete list of copyright holders would be? It should make it easier for me to argue upstream.The most important one is that not having all of the copyright holders represented means that we don't actually know what terms we are able to distribute the final work. A component of a work which is unlicenced makes the entire work undistributable.
IANAL, but I don't think so, or better, I don't agree to one assumption. Simple patches are not copyrightable (so FSF doesn't require copyright transfer). IMHO the patches sent to a upstream author which doesn't patch the original copyright (adding a name or a copyright line) should be interpreted as the above case. IMHO the author implicit acknowledges that the patch is simple and doesn't include enough intellectual work. So I interpret the patch as outside copyright laws So from CVS (as you mentioned) should give an idea if such contributions are outside the copyright laws. For new files the situation is clearly different. How did the upstream author find the patch and files of other authors? I assume that you and other send patches to CVS or to the upstream author for inclusion. If the author included code from other project, the license of the imported code should be know. ciao cate