2007/12/22, Christian Seiler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > PPS: Oh, yeah, if it should be legally necessary, I grant the right to > anybody to use this patch under any OSI certified license you may want > to choose. > > That's very kind of you but, if I was explained right, you don't have copyright on a patch. If I understood the legalese correctly, you retain authorship on the code provided, but this kind of derived work, which has no purpose outside the original, cannot be claimed through copyright. You specially did it for the php codebase, and has not a meaning outside it.
Consider what happens to the code you make to maintain an in-house application of a company. You cannot claim copyright on that codebase, it remains to the company. But, if you were to develop an app from scratch for the same company, the company has the right to use it in-house, but if they want to distribute it, they have to require your consent, because you're one of the copyright holders. Also consider what happens to reviewers that check and correct works from other people, such as syntax and grammar checking in literature, or code reviewing in software. They can claim authorship on their corrections, but they cannot claim copyright. Anyway, it's too complicate. The bottom line is that copyright cannot be claimed on patches. Which makes complete sense, imagine what would happen to open-source if it wasn't this way... the licensing documentation would occupy more than the code itself...
