The committer who does the initial commit of a file may be committing the work of a contributor and/or her/his own work. The standard copyright notice does not include the author's name (other than in the special cases that led to the original thread above). Subsequently, changes are committed by the same or other committers. There is no really natural way to draw the line between what amounts to a "major revision" and what is a minor change. In fact, we generally like to keep the individual changes small so that they can be reviewed and rolled back if the community does not like them or finds problems with them. Over time, many small changes result in a major progress. In most apache projects, we have given up the practice of tracking authorship via @author tags (following board recommendation). We do track changes (via commit logs and commit messages published to dev lists) and most committers consistently acknowledge the source of contributed code directly in commit messages and/or indirectly by reference to an issue tracking report.
The "original work" (what is first committed) in the generic case is in general not a finished product that can logically form the basis for "derivative works." The only things that we have at apache that could reasonably be described as finished products are releases. Even then, we like to follow "release early, release often."
One more relevant point is that the apache web site is not the only distribution point for apache software. In addition to various bundlings and repackaging by other OSS and commercial groups, many of the java components are available for automated "build-time" download and integration from the apache java repository and/or ibiblio.org. For these reasons, our policy up to now has been to require that all licences and notifications be included in the distributions (both binary and source) themselves.
Phil
Larry Rosen Response:
Your changed work is a new derivative work. Its copyright is owned by the author of that derivative work. You should say the following in the source code of your derivative work only:
Copyright 2005 Phil Steitz. Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation under a Contributor Agreement.
The download page on the ASF website for that software, distributed as part of ASF's collective work, would say:
Copyright 2005 Apache Software Foundation.
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Jeffrey Thompson wrote:
Phil Steitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 03/05/2005 06:59:14 PM: > I don't pretend to understand any of this; but this sounds like it could > save us volunteers a little time, so let me ask the following question: > > Suppose we have a source file that was created @apache as part of an > ongoing project. When first added to the source repo, it included our > standard copyright notice in its header file. That notice referenced the > year that it was added, say 2004. Now 2005 rolls around and I make and > commit a change to the file. Do I need to change > > * Copyright 2004 The Apache Software Foundation. > > to > > * Copyright 2004-2005 The Apache Software Foundation. > > Thanks! > > Phil >
Do you need to? Not really. The purpose of the year in the copyright notice is to indicate when the copyright term started so that people can calculate when the work moves into the public domain. In your hypo, the file was created in 2004, so that's when the copyright on the file begins. Using a span of dates (eg., 2004-2005) is mostly used for collective works where individual pieces might be 2004 and others might be 2005. For simplicity, I'd suggest keeping the initial date unless you've performed some sort of major revision.
Jeff
Staff Counsel, IBM Corporation (914)766-1757 (tie)8-826 (fax) -8160 (notes) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (internet) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (web) http://www.beff.net/
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