Hi, On Friday 13 June 2008 11:30, Henning Sprang wrote: > Is it somebody who sends a patch fixing a minor typo, or is it about > contributions of more than 10, or 20 lines?
You will laugh, it's defined in the law: "substancial contributions".
It's not defined by quantity, but quality.
> What if a 10 line patch has to be changed so much to fit in nicely, by
> the main author, that it's only 10 half lines in the end, and the main
> author can be said to have equal as much or more work integrating the
> patch, as the original author when initially writing it?
If that integration work is substancial, the person doing the merge also get's
copyright for that :-) But that doesn't change the orginal patch authors
copyright...
> And that's the point Thomas said will be a lot work, and what he doesn't
> like to do before
> Lenny. A point that should be easy to understand.
If Thomas doesn't like to credit people he shouldn't accept patches. Sorry,
but that's how it is.
If Henning really wanted to insist, he could file RC bugs requesting the
removal of FAI from stable, too. (I'm sure he doesnt want to do that, and I'm
quite confident, he won't do it.)
> It's sad, and it leads to a lot overhead when handling minor
> contributions and bugfixes, but it seems to be the only way to make sure
> such situations, as we have now do not occur again.
If handled properly from the beginning, the overhead is not that bad. For
fixing the past, there is "svn blame" (which is also useful to move along in
the future).
Look at the kernel changelog. Every change (and there are LOTS) is properly
credited to the author, Linus Torvalds doesnt claim to have written each line
of the kernel.
Last, but not least, let me say that I'm sure that we all agree, that we
prefer to work on code than on licencing issues. But the history of free
software is _the_ lesson, why licencing has to be done right.
regards,
Holger
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