Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 6:33 AM, Charles Plessy wrote:
>> I share the same feeling and in some of my latest packages, I simply
>> make no mention of copyright for my contributions, so that they are
>> distributed under the same terms as the whole.
> It sounds like you are confusing copyright holders with license grants?
> It appears that you are intentionally creating a situation where the
> copyright information is incorrect?
There's no real legal requirement to list the copyright holders, and the
copyright information for nearly all open source projects that don't do
copyright assignment is probably at least partially incorrect. (Few
projects add copyright statements for every non-trivial patch that they
merge, mostly because there's no real point.) But it is certainly true
that, in that situation, Charles does retain copyright. He is, however,
avoiding placing any further requirements on people distributing his work
by not adding to the copyright statement that has to be reproduced (with
some licenses, not all).
I personally add my own copyright statement and license because I like to
be explicit, but assuming that work without a specific license is
distributed under the same license as the larger work is ubiquitous in the
open source world. So it's not really creating any new problem.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: