While working on reviewing the copyright and license status of all the code in
drizzle right now, I've run into a few files that have unclear status.
I've been contacting authors individually, but I'd like to remind everyone of
some facts that may not always be clear.
First, if a file is trivially reproducible, it does not need a copyright or
license. Meaning, if it is
#!/bin/sh
tests/run_tests --now --kthxbye
There is no need.
However, as an example of one that has a copyright notice, and does in fact
need one, despite only being 4 lines:
#!/bin/sh
# Copyright (C) 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
for file in `ack-grep -f | grep -v innobase | grep -v gnulib | grep -v
'\.pb\.'| grep -v bak-header | grep -v '^intl' | grep -v '^config' | grep -v
'\.am$' | grep -v '\.ac$' | grep -v m4 | grep -v sql_yacc.yy | grep -v
'.gperf$' | grep -v 'drizzled/probes.h' | grep -v 'util/dummy.cc'` ; do
grep Copyright $file >/dev/null 2>&1 || echo "No copyright header in
$file"
uncrustify -c config/uncrustify.cfg --replace $file
done
This file Is very short, but would be very difficult to reproduce.
Because it has a very clear copyright attribution, and a very clear notice
stating that it is licensed under the GPLv2, there is no doubt about its
licensing status.
Without these simple headers, developers and users may have a hard time
trusting that the file is in fact covered under the global GPLv2 license file
in the root directory (COPYING). At the very least, with a Copyright notice,
the user can seek you out and ask for a clarification, though an explicit
notice would be preferable, as its entirely possible this code may be copied
and used in another program, where the COPYING file might be changed, which
might violate your rights as a copyright holder!
We've discussed some ways to help prevent this from happening in the future,
including running checks similar to the one above on added files during hudson
builds. If you have any ideas, speak up!
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