gpl header copyright bugfix for my old contributions ready to be?merged

[Henning Glawe]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 11:57:14PM +0200, Michael Tautschnig wrote:
> unless they have given it away through some kind of written permission. (In the
> GCC project, all contributors are required to sign such a document to get their
> code integrated.) 

AFAIK there is no "giving away of copyright" in german law, as there is in US
law. however, you can give your work away under a license that allows
modifications or incorporation into different products (this would then be
BSD-like licenses).


> is respecting Hennings copyright-requests. Of course, (sorry, Henning) we
> herewith assume that his claims are correct.

no offense taken ;) I reconstructed the information in this branch from some
sources (which I have still on disk... ok. strictly speaking, this is no
"proof"):
- archives of patches I submitted upstream
- archives of PM with thomas
- my fai-update-system NG tree, which was incorporated as softupdate into
  fai (and to some extend was also a preparation of "fai dirinstall", I
  remember the discussions about why i introduced $DO_INIT_TASKS...).

and comparing this to the current fai code. apart from case changes in
variable names, the code is still there.

Also, note that in my commit messages in that branch, i specified to what
these claims refer.


> In the future, we might come to some agreement like "patches changing less than
> 10 lines are considered minor." We should probably help Thomas by proposing some

well, especially in perl 10 lines may be a lot ;)


> viable rules, because after all he has the burden of doing the legal stuff then.
> In fact, anybody sending a patch which Thomas intends to accept should have
> - clearly stated the license, or rather that they agreed with GPL
> - claim or give away copyright
> 
> Regular contributors might also want to sign some some piece of paper giving
> away the copyright for any future contributions (no idea, whether this is legal
> at all...), so simplify this kind of paperwork.
> 

give away "urherberrecht" ("author's rights"/"intellectual property law"/"copyright"
in germany) is AFAIK not possible. licensing the work under GPL should be the
way to go.

p.s.: I contributed also to other projects, and most of them seem to handle
this as "put all authors into the gpl/copyright header".

-- 
c u
henning