Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:41:54AM -0500, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> Thank you for these responses because they did help me understand
> copyright/left better.  I appreciate your expertise in the matter
> and would hope I can draw on it again in the future, because despite
> what you said a few emails ago, copyright/left is not something that
> every software developer understands.

I'm curious as to why this is?  Didn't you learn about this in school
(if you went to school for software development), or from any company
you have worked for?  At numerous companies I have worked for, it was
part of the "introduction to company FOO, here's your legal training on
what to do and not to do with regards to open source."  _ANY_ company
dealing with Linux should have this type of thing in place, otherwise,
as I have found out first hand, it can get you in big trouble.

> My fundamental confusion was over the question of what is the
> smallest copyrightable unit.  I think in terms of blame/kudos and
> the unit that comes to mind is one commit, properly isolated.  When
> a project becomes serious, I get careful about the signoffs vs
> authors vs reporters etc. And "blame" is as much a part of the game
> as "kudos".

Yes, an individual "unit" of contribution is copyrightable, but, and
this is the important part, it doesn't modify the overall copyright of
the whole file unless some other criteria is met (i.e. a "major" change
to the file overall, this has come to mean at least 1/3 of the
logic/code.)

And then there's the overall copyright for the whole program, which too
depends on the copyrights of the individual files, that is another thing
to determine.

Yes, this isn't obvious at first glance, go consult a copyright lawyer
for the specific details if you are curious about it.

Which, again, I strongly feel that the Foundation needs to do before
anymore "Copyright Gentoo Foundation" marks get added to _any_ files in
our tree.

thanks,

greg k-h