ron minnich wrote:
IANAL (I'm not giving legal advice, yada yada), but I don't think that is how this works. Companies you don't work for can't force you to do X or prevent you to do Y with their files.
Copyright statements are pretty complicated, and I am not sure you are right. I am afraid I can't take your advice ;-)
You can change the code. But the copyright statement is pretty clear that you can't remove the copyright.
Copyright is one thing, licensing is a very different thing.
I haven't gotten the impression that anyone is suggesting to remove or even change any copyright notices.
Copyright documents authorship (like git does too) but says nothing about licensing terms.
The discussion is about having a uniform and short way to express the license terms for individual files.
Consider the simplest case: change the copyright to say V3 instead of V2. Would that be acceptable?
You are confusing copyright with licensing here. Copyright is a year and an author. Those do not change.
Licensing terms can be changed with permission of the author. But if an author contributed code licensed as GPLv2 then the license can not be changed to v3 without the author's permission. How to document such permission is a different discussion.
However, if the author has contributed code licensed as GPLv2 then anyone who has that code can do, at a minimum, everything that the license permits them to do.
Since the license header text is also covered by the license, replacing it with an equivalent seems completely unproblematic to me.
Generally you're supposed to take the text in the copyright as given and not change it. Certainly older coreboot code with US Gov't copyright made that clear.
Copyright yes of course.
Licensing is orthogonal.
I've had it stated pretty clearly to me by people who are lawyers that it's a very bad idea to start rearranging copyright statements.
If they are the source of your confusion between copyright and licensing they probably shouldn't be giving advice on this topic anyway.
//Peter
2015-03-04 14:58 GMT+01:00 Peter Stuge peter@stuge.se:
I haven't gotten the impression that anyone is suggesting to remove or even change any copyright notices.
Copyright documents authorship (like git does too) but says nothing about licensing terms.
Section 1 of the GPLv2 contains: "keep intact all the notices that refer to this License". I'm not a lawyer or I'd have more interesting things to do than to argue on mailing lists, but that doesn't look quite as clear cut to me.
Patrick
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Patrick Georgi -
Peter Stuge