On May 30, 2002 at 15:18, Ken Hornstein wrote:
The problem is that because of the lack of a clear copyright, we may not
be able to host nmh there. I was waiting to hear back from Loic, but I ju
st
pinged him again. We may be stuck with SourceForge.
Why not just do things like the CVS project does? You can even point
Loic to it and how there are source files in it that have no copyright
or license statement.
It's not on savannah, as far as I can tell. That seems to be the difference.
Although it is inconsistent with FSF's apparent concern about copyright
matters.
As a simple test, I downloaded a GNU project from Savannah, oleo,
and noticed that there was at least one source file, plotter.c,
that fails to contain a "proper" copyright notice.
I expect FSF to be very particular about copyright for projects they
would make part of the GNU project, but for non-GNU software, I'd
figure they would be a little lax. If the license is compatible with
what FSF would accept for a license, why be so anal about copyright
notices?
With that said, it is probably important, independent of Savannah, to
have some adequate copyright notices to cover any potential legalese
problems in the future. Maybe have something like the following
for each source file:
Copyright (C) <YEARS>, Authors of nmh.
See AUTHORS document of the nmh distribution.
The the AUTHORS document could have the details of initially written
by RAND, UCI, Richard, et. al. and make reference to ChangeLog to
cover contributions by individuals.
In sum, try, in some manner, to duplicate whatever technique other
projects do that have many authors.
--ewh