On 18/01/2017 16:17, Alex Rousskov wrote:
The authors licensed their code.
Where you place that licensed code is up to you, and you may mix "code
pieces" as needed.
Ok. In fact BSD says "use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted", so "use" implies that you can
transform/move/reorganize the source code.
When dealing with a project containing a complex mixture of simple,
"simple" :-) More I read BSD license text, and less I think it is
simple. I prefer complex but clear licenses :-)
compatible licenses like BSD and MIT, the easiest thing to do is to
acknowledge their existence in one place (e.g., NOTICE or COPYING file),
under a general "this Software contains code licensed under the
following licenses:" header.
Sorry if I'm (maybe) too much pedantic, but BSD requires also that:
* redistributions of source code retain the above copyright notice
* redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice
So probably to comply 100% with the requirement of the license, if you
have 10 source files, with the license header in them, for reusing the
code in these files, you need to extract all the different authors, and
list them in some place as you said, and they must be acknowledged also
from the binary application in some LICENSE/CREDIT menu. So for every
author of every source file, you should mention them.
I doubt there are many projects doing so, but reading the license it
should be the path to follow. But it is obviously mainly an academic
discussion, because from a practical point of view if you cite the
original project, and the main authors, all the minor authors are
indirectly and automatically acknowledged, because you can retrieve the
original project source code, and I doubt they will sue you :-)
Regarding the fact to leave the BSD license header in the source file or
not, I think the same thing of you, but in any case the BSD license is
not crystal clear on this because it says:
"Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer."
"retain" is a rather strong word. It's meaning is "continue to have",
"keep in a particular place", so if we read it literally, you should
take the header in this position, and then the BSD license still apply
to the source file, and by consequence you can not use a different
license, but this should be absurd.
So I'm still convinced that BSD license text is not very precise.
Regards,
Massimo
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