GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 634550
Fix up copyright and license notices for St
Last modified: 2010-12-06 17:30:45 UTC
* Make sure all source files have a LGPL copyright header, and standardize non-standard variations of the header to a common form. * Check and update all copyright notices. * Remove 'Written By:' lines. They are universally incomplete and typically indicate only who started a particular file.
Created attachment 174217 [details] [review] Fix up copyright and license notices for St
Comment on attachment 174217 [details] [review] Fix up copyright and license notices for St >* Make sure all source files have a LGPL copyright header, and standardize > non-standard variations of the header to a common form. The standard form recommended by the FSF now (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html) ends with: You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. rather than giving their mailing address, so that everyone doesn't have to update all their copyright headers again next time the FSF moves. >* Check and update all copyright notices. There are inconsistencies between "Copyright 2009, 2010" and "Copyright 2009-2010". I don't know if this matters at all. Also, it might be nice to get rid of the "(C)"s everywhere, since they're legally meaningless. >+ * st-overflow-box.c: A vertical box which paints as many actors as it can fit >+ * >+ * Copyright 2009, 2010 Red Hat, Inc. >+ * > * Portions derived from st-box-layout.c, which is > * Copyright 2009 Intel Corporation. I don't think there's any need to keep the "portions derived from" line, and it's inconsistent with the changes elsewhere.
What about JS code? Most of it does not have a copyright declaration at all, but of course that does not mean the authors are assigning copyright (to whom, anyway? GNOME Foundation?). On the other hand, does writing copyright in JS increase memory / disk usage for user (and thus is bad)?
According to "best practices" we should have copyright and license headers on all our source files. It feels ugly to have read and discard the headers for all the JS source files, but I doubt it's really a concern in practice. In this commit I stuck to St since that was enough work to deal with and I had a particular request to do it from the MX maintainer (so patches could be folded back). Copyright notices have almost nothing to do with actual copyright - whether I put in no copyright notice, or "Copyright 2010, The King of Siam", my code contributions are still copyright to me (or to my employer, if I'm doing them on company time). The main legal point of a Copyright notice, in my non-lawyer knowledge, is that you can prove that someone was *knowingly* violating your copyright.
(In reply to comment #2) > (From update of attachment 174217 [details] [review]) > >* Make sure all source files have a LGPL copyright header, and standardize > > non-standard variations of the header to a common form. > > The standard form recommended by the FSF now > (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html) ends with: > > You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License > along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. > > rather than giving their mailing address, so that everyone doesn't have > to update all their copyright headers again next time the FSF moves. All updated. > >* Check and update all copyright notices. > > There are inconsistencies between "Copyright 2009, 2010" and "Copyright > 2009-2010". I don't know if this matters at all. Also, it might be nice > to get rid of the "(C)"s everywhere, since they're legally meaningless. The FSF recommendation is a list of all years. 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2009, or whatever. It's there would ever be a legal situation on this code when a notice of 2006-2009 left up in the air whether there was code in their copyright 2007 or not and we cared. (It's not like copyrights _expire_ these days after all...) So I went with a policy of , for two years and a range for more than two years. > >+ * st-overflow-box.c: A vertical box which paints as many actors as it can fit > >+ * > >+ * Copyright 2009, 2010 Red Hat, Inc. > >+ * > > * Portions derived from st-box-layout.c, which is > > * Copyright 2009 Intel Corporation. > > I don't think there's any need to keep the "portions derived from" line, and > it's > inconsistent with the changes elsewhere. That one cleaned up. Left a few other places where the history was more intricate and potentially more interesting.