[D-runtime] druntime license and copypasta bugs

[David Nadlinger]

On Sep 3, 2011, at 11:31 AM, Jonathan M Davis<jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  wrote:
 > That's easy enough to fix, but who's the copyright owner if not the 
authors?
 > Digital Mars?

On 9/3/11 10:47 PM, Sean Kelly wrote:
> For runtime and Phobos I think ts always the original author.  Not so with GCC code though, for example.


First, I am not a lawyer, and indeed it would be great if we could get 
advise from an actual copyright expert on the subject. But still, a few 
ideas from my experience with other open source projects, like KDE:

As far as I know, there is no such thing as a single copyright holder or 
»original author« per source file, but instead all contributors retain 
the rights for the code they submit. Thus, the actual copyright for a 
source file in question is typically scattered among several authors. 
Because of this, e.g. files from the KDE project includes a copyright 
line for all authors, like:

Copyright <year>-<year> <name of first author> <first e-mail>
Copyright <year> <name of second author> <second e-mail>

If I understand the situation correctly, requiring a single copyright 
line resp. making a difference between »Authors:« and »Copyright:« makes 
no sense for typical open source projects, but it could well be I am 
wrong here.

While we are at it, easily being able to reconstruct the ownership 
status and contact all the authors is one of the key reasons behind Git 
recording name and email from both author and committer. This obviously 
doesn't obviate any legal requirements for copyright notices or similar, 
but can be helpful in tracing down potential claims.

By the way, the copyright being split among many authors is the reason 
why it near impossible for larger projects (e.g. the Linux kernel) to 
change the license or to pursue license violations, because it would 
require obtaining approval from all the people who ever contributed a 
patch. For this reason, some projects require all contributors to assign 
their copyright to some central legal entity, usually a nonprofit.

David