On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Prashant Shah <pshah.mum...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am looking towards the copyright point of view.
Still not sure what objective you are trying to serve. By saying the copyright point of view do you mean you just want to keep track of the copyright owners? I'm going to assume that is what you mean for the rest of this email. If it isn't then you probably should be clearer about what your objective is. > In majority of cases the version control system used has the log of > who submitted the code. Only if there are major changes then it might > be necessary to include that in the file itself. How does one put that > point across. I think you're only thinking within the confines of an open source project where someone submits code that goes into the projects version control system. With a license like this you may have forked versions with modifications that may or may not have source code available for them. Even if the source code is available there's no guarantee that the version control system (if any) used by the modifier is publicly accessible. Even if the version control system is publicly accessible there's no guarantee that you can find the version control system that matches with the distribution that you have. If you want to be sure that you can identify the copyright holder of modifications I don't think there's an easy way to get rid of any book keeping requirement on the actual distributed files. Given that the modifications do not automatically fall under the same license, it can make it difficult to find modifications you want online and bring them into your project if the identity of the modifier is not clear. This clause is viewed as burdensome by some when I don't think in practice it really is. Remember you only have to say you modified the file and identify yourself. There's no requirement to describe your changes. If you're distributing source and using a version control system it should be easy to automate marking files that have been modified. If you're distributing object forms it shouldn't be hard to include something in the object that says you made modifications, e.g. if the object is executable wherever the copyright notice appears note that this is a modified version. The only place I think that it's particularly burdensome is if you're distributing libraries, since I have no idea what would constitute a prominent notice on the actual file. ELF has a comment section you could use, but I'd be hard pressed to characterize it as prominent notice. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss