[coreboot] [commit] r5717 - in trunk/src/superio/fintek: . f71863fg

[xdrudis]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 05:53:19PM -0400, Corey Osgood wrote:
> 
> Here's the problem: some time ago, someone wrote a superio chip.h that
> contained this:
>

[...] 

Sorry, I didn't understand the problem. I thought it was triviality and 
it was removal of the whole contribution of a previous author. 


> removing everything that I did to that file. So why should they leave
> me as a copyright holder on the file?
>

Because it is easier than finding out who is the real author of the part
of the file that survives. It makes nothing worse than it was and
it does not bring more risks than removing your name.  If they remove
your copyright statement they have to make sure that you really didn't
change more than what they have replaced. They may not be able to
verify that unless svn kept track of which was the original file (I
think it depends on whether you did svn cp or cp ?). If they leave
your name and there's nothing you wrote on the file what's the worst
than can happen ? That you sue them for attributing to you something
you didn't write ? I don't think you could, specially if they add
their own name, they are not saying which author wrote what. They took
a collective work, made a derivative work and added their name to the
previous authors. If you don't want that then simply add a comment 
speciying which part are yours and which aren't (but I hope you don't). 
If they remove your name and somehow you had changed
something in the file that's still there they could have more
problems, I think.

If somebody knew what the first file was, at least pepole could always 
use that as a template and keep the copyright notices shorter (they and 
the original author). But if it's too late for that I don't think 
that following the routine of keeping the original copyrights has 
so severe a consequence that it is worth making exceptions.

But I think I'm arguing too much for something that it is not so important
to me and that I'm no expert in.  I feel like I'm splitting hair. I should
be splitting patches...