Hi Ben, On Monday 27 January 2014 10:25:35 Ben Finney wrote: > Franck Joncourt <franck@debian.org> writes: [...] > > The matter is some people have contributed significantly to, for > > example, the utils.c file, however they have no copyright. > > I'm not sure what you mean by “they have no copyright”. All such > contributions have copyright held by someone, usually the author. > > Do you mean their copyright is not properly described in the source? Here is an example: /** **************************************************** * * @file config_init.c * * @author Developer1 * * @brief Command-line and config file processing for fwknop client. * * Copyright 2009-2013 dev1name <dev1name@...> * 2014 dev2name <dev2name@...> * * License (GNU General Public License): * * This program is free software ... * **************************************************** */ It is sometimes easy to forget to add copyright year for someone who provided a significant patch, thus I am looking for a way to avoid forgetting such information. > > I was thinking about adding something like this in each file header: > > > > Author: Fwknop developers (see AUTHORS file > > > > - https://github.com/mrash/fwknop/blob/master/AUTHORS) > > > > Copyright: 2012-2014 Fwknop developers and contributors > > > > (see https://github.com/mrash/fwknop/blob/master/CREDITS) > > Using a URL for this purpose isn't good, because at some future point > the documents at those URLs might be different, or even not available > any more; but the text needs to remain relevant for many years > (copyright lasts many decades). I found this approach here : http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html But, as I am not sure, I prefer asking people with a better knowledge on the subject :) > So it's better to not refer to any URL for such information, and refer > only to files in the source work itself. > > For example: > > Fwknop is developed primarily by the people listed in the file > ‘AUTHORS’. Copyright © 2012–2014 Fwknop developers and contributors. For a > full list of contributors, see the file ‘CREDITS’. > > This is a common (and, IMO, usually satisfactory) solution to the > problem of attribution for a work with many copyright holders: Avoid > references to URLs for information that needs to persist over time, put > all the information centrally in the source tarball, with a clear > referenced from each file in that tarball. One last point. Is is mandatory the CREDIT file provides email addresses for contributors (if they have one, or at least if they want to share it)? Ok. I am going to propose that to upstream. It looks fine to me an easy to maintain. Thanks. -- Franck Joncourt
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