[dev] Copyright questions

[Michael J Rubinsky]

Quoting Ralf Lang <lang at b1-systems.de>:

> Am Mittwoch, 27. Juli 2011, 11:50:44 schrieb Gunnar Wrobel:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I was wondering a bit about the way we mention copyright in our code.
>>
>> We do have copyright notices in most of our files, sometimes PHP
>> doclinks as well. and some packages (the applications) offer
>> COPYING/LICENSE.
>>
>> The copyright statement in the code files usually mention the
>> COPYING/LICENSE file that should come with the package. For the
>> framework components its is usually not present though.
>>
>> And I don't even know if having such copyright statements in the code
>> is actually needed. I once read that the COPYING/LICENSE file in a
>> package would be enough. The maintenance effort of having maybe only
>> two or three links to copyright information would be much lower.
>>
>> So I wonder a bit if we can improve the situation. It is at least
>> somewhat confusing to me at the moment and if possible I would like to
>> get it simpler. Does anybody know what requirements we actually
>> see/have in that area? I'm willing to invest a bit of time to find out
>> what kind of legal requirements exist but maybe somebody already knows.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Gunnar
>
> As nobody else jumped on this:
>
> I'm really in favor of changing the license headers in the files to:
>
>  * Copyright 1999-2011 The Horde Project (http://www.horde.org/)
>  *
>  * See the enclosed file COPYING for license information (LGPL). If you did
>  * not receive this file, see http://opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.php
>
> into
>
>  * Copyright 1999-2011 The Horde Project (http://www.horde.org/)
>  *
>  * See http://opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.php
>  * for license information (LGPL)
>
> and dropping the shipped files. As long as the law-savvy agree...

Sounds good to me, though I'm not law-savvy. Though we should change  
the copyright holder to the LLC while we are making these changes.

-- 
mike

The Horde Project (www.horde.org)
mrubinsk at horde.org