[PATCH] change the Copyright year from 2007 to 2008

Wolfgang Spraul wolfgang at openmoko.com
Wed Sep 17 05:34:23 CEST 2008


Antoine, Werner, Rod et al.
Openmoko's 'preferred' license is GPL v3 and LGPL v3. 'preferred' is  
meant in the smartest way you can think of.
upstream license preference trumps Openmoko's, or else we wouldn't be  
using that whole piece of software.
For the kernel, I think upstream accepts "v2 or later", so that's what  
we do because v3 would not be accepted. If upstream does not even  
accept "or later", then we do just "v2".

I explained these preferences to xiangfu a while back, but everybody  
please remember that there is a big language barrier between people  
with good/very good English skills, and those just learning.
I think a patch that changes the license terms in someone else's  
source codes is unacceptable.

If you make large changes (more than 20 lines I would say) to a source  
file, you should update the copyright years, i.e. add the current  
year. If there is a year at all in the file. I don't know whether the  
years should be in every file, if not I would prefer to not have them  
at all in each file, just in COPYING or so.
You never change the license terms in a file that is not entirely  
written by yourself, not even subtly by adding "or later", let alone  
changing the license version from v2 to v3. If you want to do that,  
you need permission by all the other authors of the file.

Antoine - thank you very much for bringing this up!
Best Regards,
Wolfgang

On Sep 17, 2008, at 1:15 AM, Antoine Reid wrote:

>
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Werner Almesberger <werner at openmoko.org 
> > wrote:
> xiangfu wrote:
> >  /* Smedia Glamo 336x/337x driver
> >   *
> > - - * (C) 2007 by OpenMoko, Inc.
> > + * (C) 2008 by OpenMoko, Inc.
> >   * Author: Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>
>
> In cases where there is actual content that's been copied (and not  
> just
> the copyright notice itself), I would suggest to update copyright
> notices by adding the new years or by using a range, e.g.,
>
>  * (C) 2007, 2008 by OpenMoko, Inc.
>
>  * (C) 2007-2008 by OpenMoko, Inc.
>
> or even
>
>  * (C) 2007, 2009-2010 by OpenMoko, Inc.
>
> (in case nobody worked on that file in 2008.)
>
> - Werner
>
>
>
> Also how about the change from GPLv2 to GPLv3?  Is all the code  
> going to be GPLv3 now?  The license already says "either version 2  
> of the License, or (at your option) any later version." which lets  
> people use the code in a GPLv3 application.  Changing the license to  
> require a minimum of GPLv3 would (in my opinion, I am NOT a lawyer)  
> prevent someone from using some of this code in a GPLv2 application...
>
> Is this change to GPLv3 intentional?  Not that I am for or against  
> any specific version of the GPL but this seems like a subtle way of  
> changing the licensing terms in a patch whose description is "just  
> change the Copyright year from 2007 to 2008.".  Maybe I missed  
> another thread discussing this..?
>
>
> .02$
> antoine
>
> -- 
> Antoine Reid

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