Karl Berry writes [quoting me]: > > Do you know what they are? > > Not any more. I can research again. But is there a problem with just > updating? It's not like the basic meaning changed or anything.
But the details may have. If the changes are just clarifications, then I don't have a problem with updating, but there isn't a lot of motivation to do so, either. If the changes remove restrictions, then there could be more motivation to update, but you're already free to apply the more liberal terms. If the changes add restrictions, then we'd have to consider what those restrictions are and whether we want to apply them. Remember that the FSF has a political agenda that the CVS maintainers may or may not agree with. > There are several problems [with the existing copyright notices]: First, note that copyright notices are no longer required at all under the Berne Convention, which every country apt to recognize a copyright notice at all has subscribed to. > 1) Legally, just saying "as specified in the README file" is not > sufficient. Something resembling the actual notice has to appear in > each source file. This sucks, but the legal system cannot be bug-fixed. No, a pointer to the notice is sufficient. See "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". > 2) Ranges in copyright years are not allowed. Each year must be written > out. This sucks too. According to the US Copyright Office's Circular 3, even that was not officially allowed. You presumably needed a separate notice for each year. > 3) There are no copyright years for anything after 1992, but I feel > certain that add.c has been modified in the last 10 years :). In > general, each year that a The existing copyright notices are the ones inserted by the original authors of the code. The volunteer maintainers have not added any additional notices, nor have they assigned their rights to the FSF (as you note, CVS is *not* a GNU project), making the legal ownership of the code quite murky and any new notices subject to challenge. Nonetheless, all contributors have agreed (at least implicitly) to allow their code to be distributed under the terms of the GPL, making it all pretty moot. So far as I can see, the only reason to make any changes would be to advance the FSF's political agenda, which I don't feel any compelling reason to do. And the changes would be on very shaky legal ground anyway. -Larry Jones It's clear I'll never have a career in sports until I learn to suppress my survival instinct. -- Calvin _______________________________________________ Bug-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-cvs