Re: List the copyright holders (Re: Level Comment...)

[David Philippi]

Am Mo, den 12.04.2004 schrieb Jarno Elonen um 11:49:
> The people who have contributed have the copyright, wether they are listed or 
> not. If you don't list them, someone in the "downstream" may have to. I am a 
> Debian package maintainer myself and have found it to be a real Pain in da 
> Butt to try and write a proper copyright notifications for the package when 
> the "upstream" developers haven't listed the contributors.

At which level of contribution does one start to list someone? I know
that in some states like the usa, you can give up your copyright
entirely and put things into the public domain. In germany on the other
hand, you can never give up the copyright itself, only the rights
stemming from it.

> BTW: now that I'm still the only copyright holder of the comment tool, I'd 
> like to change the license of the tool to Modified BSD instead of GPL. If 
> someone want's to use some snippet of PHP from it, I don't see any reason to 
> require all her other PHP code to be GPL'd. Please apply the attached patch 
> to subversion and delete COPYING. The patch contains no functional changes.

Well, to do it absolutely correct, I'll have to gather the permission of
Björn Fischer first or revert his patch if he doesn't approve, right? I
hate those pesky legal matters, it's a shame for humanity as a whole
that one has to put so much thought into them.

Bye David