Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] new dllist (yet again)

[skaller <sk...@us...>]

On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 13:39, Jesse D. Guardiani wrote:
> Brian Hurt wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>(*
> >> * Dllist- a mutable, circular, doubly linked list library
> >> * Copyright (C) 2004 Brian Hurt
> >> *
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Jesse, if you're stepping up to maintain this code, you should probably 
> >change this like to:
> > * Copyright (C) 2004 Brian Hurt, Jesse Gaurdiani
> >  
> >
> 
> I didn't want to change it since it's GPL, but I certainly don't mind. 
> Thanks.

If its GPL then it cannot be used in Extlib. 

If you modify it you SHOULD add your authorship to the
copyright notice, otherwise the notice would incorrectly
seem to indicate that Brian is fully responsible -- which
might be construed as fraud. (Specifically, 'passing off',
which means misattributing the authorship. Usually that's
passing off some work someone else did as your own,
but the reverse can apply as well).

This is true for almost all
licences, even very liberal FFAU licences. The one thing
an author does NOT want is for some code he *didn't* write
and isn't responsible for to cause some problem, and have
the user complain to him about it.

If you modify some open source software -- you should
take the first line of responsibility for the whole
of it. It is customary to also give the whole credit
to the upstream author. Most people say something like

"All credit goes to Brian, and all the bugs are mine"

or some such semi-humorous line.

Anyhow I'm just trying to point out you aren't being
generous in failing to attribute the authorship
correctly. If your code is good, you deserve some
of the credit and should take it. If there are bugs,
you deserve some of the blame and should take it :)

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:sk...@us...
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net