Re: [Perlunit-devel] copyrights

[Matthew A. <mc...@us...>]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 04:58:51PM +0000, Adam Spiers wrote:
> Matthew Astley (mc...@us...) wrote:
> > (Yes, I'm still here .. sorry I've been so quiet, I'm mostly using
> > JUnit instead, at the moment!)
> 
> Traitor! ;-)

*cower* I'm sorry, I didn't have time to port PerlUnit to Java! 9-)

> > Your point though, is (?) that it's the delicacy of refactoring the
> > credits which is the problem, not the legality.
> 
> No, it's the legality I was worried about, since the refactoring is
> still giving everyone the credit they deserve.

Digressing slightly, it occurred to me we should perhaps have a
perldoc file, Test::Unit::Credits, or something? perldoc it > CREDITS
at tarball time?

> > If the new file structure serves the same legal purpose then surely
> > you're only obliged to ask each author out of politeness?
> 
> That's the thing, I'm not sure it does, because it would in effect
> take a file copyrighted by person A and make it copyrighted by persons
> A, B, C ...  I can't imagine anyone caring, but it's probably worth
> thinking about anyway.

Hmm. Well, presumably most people fall into one of two categories,

 - did enough stuff to everything to get credit for the whole

 - did few enough enumerable jobs that specific credit won't take too
   much space

What's the current favourite practice for assigning copyright? Split
it into lots of pieces so the Bad People can't wrestle it from an
individual, or consolidate so you can easily hand it over to the Good
People? Hmm, we're going to end up in a licence-size contest aren't
we? 8-(

Am I misguided in thinking that assigning credit for parts of the
project is equivalent to assigning (joint) copyright ownership for
those parts?


Matthew  #8-)