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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: koffice policies and copyright policy
From:       Cyrille Berger <cberger () cberger ! net>
Date:       2010-09-06 14:32:18
Message-ID: 201009061632.19201.cberger () cberger ! net
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On Monday 06 September 2010, zander@kde.org wrote:
> On Friday 3. September 2010 10.15.07 Cyrille Berger wrote:
> > Also more the policy is more about being safe and conservative, than to
> > be strictly accurate. Since as mentioned by the SFLC, a wrong copyright
> > line is  just legally null, a missing one, however, is a legal threat.
> 
> This is incorrect; you are limiting your view to the usage of the claim to
> copyright as a defensive point to infringement.
> This is not the only point of view; we have files in KWord that have been
> started by people 15 years ago and they have dissapeared.
> If you claim those lines can not be removed even while I am pretty darn
> sure there is no copyright left, then in some cases I am forced to throw
> away a LOT of good code if I want to do some relicencing (like we recently
> did to (L)GPLv2+) or similar.
Yes that is a good point, that was also raised to me by the CWG. There are 
case when you need to remove copyright, and in which case, the best is 
blackbox rewriting.

> The law says that if I remove someone's content I don't have to attribute
> that person anymore. Your proposal for a policy goes against that because
> you (correctly) point out that its not 100% clear.
> If its not 100% clear we should not use it as a rule, we should use it as a
> rule of thumb. Something that can be broken if you know what you are doing.
As you mentioned in this thread, the problem is that we are not lawyer, so 
there is no way to be a 100% the copyright claim is gone, unless there was a 
blackbock rewriting, or a lawyer was consulted.

But then I would suggest that in such case, the author and this list should be 
consulted.

So here is my suggestion:

"Copyright can not be removed, without the author consent, since in the case 
of incremental changes, each successive version is a derivative of the 
previous one. There are cases when removing a copyright is desirable (ie, in 
case of a need of changing a license, and one of the copyright holder, either 
disagree, or is not reachable anymore), in such case, a blackbox rewriting of 
the functions where the person we want to removed have made changes is needed"

Would something like that be acceptable ?

-- 
Cyrille Berger
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