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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: Copyright notices
From:       Matthew Woehlke <mw_triad () users ! sourceforge ! net>
Date:       2009-02-10 15:51:36
Message-ID: 4991A288.3080304 () users ! sourceforge ! net
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Please continue this on the appropriate list. I've set reply-to accordingly.

Parker Coates wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 09:11, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
>> On 10.02.09 05:33:16, Frederik Schwarzer wrote:
>>> in KShisen the copyright notice in the about dialog says:
>>> (c) 1997, Mario Weilguni
>>> 1. it is a bit out-dated. :)
>>> 2. the parenthesis form of the c is not valid in many countries
>>>
>>> What's the preferred notice here?
>>> &copy; <this_year> The KDE Team
>>> &copy; <this_year> The KDEGames Team
>>> &copy; <this_year> <current_maintainer>
>>> ...?
>> Valid forms of license headers (for code in KDE svn) are explained here:
>> http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy
>>
>> In particular copyrights should be of the form
>>
>> Copyright <year> <name> <email>
> 
> What exactly is <year> in this case? Is it the year of the first
> contribution or the year of the most recent contribution? In Killbots
> I'm using <startyear>-<mostrecentyear>. I've seen this format used
> elsewhere, but the licensing policy makes no mention of it.

According to GNU you should not use <from>-<to> form (though, granted, 
everyone does). You should list all years in which contributions were 
made. (So, really, even if using ranges you should put gaps where no 
contributions were made by that author.)

>> IANAL, but AFAIK things like "KDEGames Team" are not valid, it has to be a
>> real person.
> 
> Then why is KDevelop "(c) 1999-2009, The KDevelop developers"?

First off, if it uses only (c) (and not " ©" or "Copyright" - only one 
should be used AFAIK) it's wrong.

Second, as has been said, I suspect "sloppy" copyrights like this are 
accepted in about dialogs, since for actual copyright information it is 
needed to look at the sources (which should have correctly-written 
notices covering only that file).

IOW I think we like to have a single line in about and then list 
authors. (Actually, since we /do/ list authors, this might even be okay, 
i.e. saying "the team" and then in the same place stating who is part of 
that team...)

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
"But I want to cast Magic Missile!" -- Unknown
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