[Geany-devel] AUTHORS && THANKS files

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 23.09.2011 05:33, schrieb Matthew Brush:
> On a similar topic, I noticed in the source files, on top of the 
> license in the comments, some files list Nick and Enrico as the 
> copyright holders, some also have Frank, others Colomban, and yet 
> others Lex (and maybe others still).  It seems as though if you 
> contribute significant portions of code to a file, you should add your 
> own copyright blurb in the comments?  Would it not make more sense to 
> have a single copyright holder for all files in the project, be it a 
> person (ie. the current lead/maintainer), or an organization (ie. The 
> Geany Software Foundation :)

Copyright assignment is seen as a bad thing generally. Why would you 
want to give up rights on your code?

>
> Also, if someone contributes a significant amount of code to one or 
> more files, does that mean they hand-over the copyright of that code 
> to one (or maybe all?) of those people listed in the various file 
> headers?
>
> The reason I ask about the copyright thing is that I'm currently 
> working on something that basically adds entirely new files and I 
> wasn't sure if I should add my own copyright blurb in the fileheader 
> or that of someone else.  It almost seems like currently the copyright 
> blurbs in the file header comments are more like an "Authorship" or 
> "Attribution" than copyright.

You should definitely do that. You own the copyright, and no other 
author. And code can't have no copyright holder (unless auto generated 
perhaps). And you should defintely add yourself for significant changes.

>
> I think it might be useful to put some information about this in the 
> HACKING file so that contributors clearly know whether to put their 
> own copyright in the header, or if not, who's name/info to pass the 
> copyright on to.  Also whether they should add their names to the 
> AUTHORS file, or THANKS file, and whether they should update the 
> ChangeLog (if that sticks around) and to update the documentation.  It 
> also wouldn't hurt to mention in there that all of the submitted code 
> will become/has to be GPL, just in case that's not clear.  We're 
> coders after all, not "law talkin guys".
>

It's implicitely GPL if you're editing GPL code. That's a) due to 
copyleft and b) patches generally don't relicense.

For new files it's actually up to you. You can submit it under GPL, or 
some other license. It's up to the committer to accept the license (or 
to relicense before submitting).

Best regards.