[dev] Copyright questions

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Michael J Rubinsky <mrubinsk at horde.org>:

> 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.

The idea is that you can't guarantee a URL will be accessible in the  
future - thus, the need for distribution of the license in the package.

On the flip side, you can make the argument that no reasonable person  
would not understand what the LGPL is.

Either way, it makes more sense to link to a URL that we control.  We  
can always make that URL redirect to an outside site, but it gives us  
control to make sure the license is always correctly available.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]