[ gpsdrive ] copyrights

[Hamish]

Hi,

I hate this sort of stuff, but I'm pretty sure it is damn important and
it must be decided and dealt to by the group as a whole .....

Before the next stable release I think it is very important that we
should clean up the copyright statements scattered throughout the code
and AUTHORS file (merge with Documentation/CREDITS). It is important to
be clear about who contributed to each major source code file if, eg,
you ever have to relicense any part of it (e.g. a flaw is one day found
in the GPL) or a single contributer's work was tainted by eg their
employment agreement and had to be removed. Also it is impossible to
defend your copyright if you have assigned it to someone else by
mistake/misunderstanding. etc etc .....

At the same time we must of course respect the existing copyrights and
preserve good will with former developers.

I see everywhere messages like:
  Copyright (c) 2001-2006 Fritz Ganter <ganter at ganter.at>

That is to say that Fritz holds the copyright over the entire project,
not just the (major) parts that he wrote. ie all new contributions are
legally attributed to him as well. Personally, if I contribute code, I'd
rather hand over copyright to the project versus a former maintainer,
regardless if it was Fritz, Linus, or even RMS. (I mean to the man,
not to the FSF or similar). There are many solutions, e.g.
 (c) 2001-2004 Fritz Ganter, 2005-2007 The GpsDrive Development Team 

or each author lists their name at the top of each source code file
they contributed some significant original work to. (personally, I
don't count message cosmetics and minor bugfixes)

[note "The GpsDrive Development Team" only has a moral meaning legally
as there is no "GpsDrive, Inc." Membership in something like osgeo.org
is a solution if y'all are worried about that legal challenge]

src/gpsdrive.c has a "Contributors" section, which is a very nice start.

To me the beauty of the GPL over a BSD license is it removes the
paranoia of others' selfishness & 3rd parties taking advantage of your
hard work with no reward for you. So more developers are happier to
contribute more code. Keeping clear copyright on your contributions is
a major part of that, as it's your enforcement mechanism.

So what to do? For starters (c) stuff has no place in a window's title
bar, it belongs in the Help->About pop-up window. (also the (c)
character in the title bar renders as a "?" for me unless the win is minimized) [Etch/en_US]


Index: src/main_gui.c
===================================================================
--- src/main_gui.c      (revision 1549)
+++ src/main_gui.c      (working copy)
@@ -1635,8 +1635,7 @@
        main_window = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
 
        g_snprintf (main_title, sizeof (main_title),
-               "%s v%s  \xc2\xa9 2001-2007 Fritz Ganter", "GpsDrive",
-               VERSION);
+               "%s v%s", "GpsDrive", VERSION);
 
        gtk_window_set_title (GTK_WINDOW (main_window), main_title);
        gtk_container_set_border_width (GTK_CONTAINER (main_window), 0);


any objections to committing that much?

I don't think that violates the spirit of the gentleman's agreement
with Fritz to preserve his due credit and copyright over the old
code. ??? Do you take that the same way ???

All of Fritz's copyright statements that he put in source code headers
and his documentation must remain, what I'm advocating is to be like:
  (c) 2001-2004 Fritz Ganter, 2005-2007 The GpsDrive Development Team

or somesuch style, and not assign new code (c) 2007 Fritz Ganter, as it infact belongs to the author. After that is decided all source code files need to be audited for authorship, with authors listed (a script that pours
through the cvs checkin log can do that automatically), or at least the
main code files should theoretically get that. Or maybe "Contributers" in gpsdrive.c style is ok for each component (GUI, DB, OSM inteface, ...)?


Releasing a new version with a murky copyright status is a very bad
idea IMHO. 


comments?


all for now,
Hamish