Re: [Libmesh-devel] Copyright, credits, etc...

[Roy S. <roy...@ic...>]

On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, KIRK, BENJAMIN (JSC-EG) (NASA) wrote:

> So it just dawned on me that the copyright in the library is assigned to
> John and myself...

Yeah, I noticed that a while ago.  ;-)

> Clearly, there needs to be a copyright, but it seems like there
> should be some good way for it to extend to the larger community.

I don't think such extension is absolutely necessary - in fact I've
considered my own cvs commits of files with your names in the (C) at
the top to be (probably insufficiently formally) signing over
copyright of the patches and extensions I've written.  The LGPL grants
enough rights to users of code that I'm not particularly concerned
about the rights still restricted to authors, and requiring
contributors to sign over copyright is done by legally-paranoid OSS
projects right down to the GNU project itself.

The most important right remaining to authors is the right to
relicense - I could create a GPL fork of libmesh right now, but if I
wanted to create a BSD fork or a closed source fork I'd need your and
John's permission.  If we encourage (even allow) everyone who makes a
hundred line patch to retain their copyright on it, then the number of
people who would need to agree to relicensing would quickly make
obtaining everyone's permission impossible.  Whether that would be a
good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view.

On the other hand, perhaps the horse has already left the barn - there
are lots of other libMesh contributors and we can't assume that none
of them care about retaining their copyrights.  This doesn't mean that
everybody who has contributed should be listed in the copyright header
on every file, but at this point perhaps the best thing we can do is
to make sure people are accurately listed as copyright holders for the
files they've made major edits to.

> Ideas?  Perhaps we need to include a credits section somewhere to list
> developers & their major contributions?

That sounds like a very good idea, regardless.  I think ideally we
would have a CREDITS file listing everyone who's submitted so much as
a bugfix, and then a copyright file listing everyone who holds
copyright to any subset of the library.
---
Roy