Hi! > MY understanding is that removing the @author @copyright tags in > MediaWiki code represent ownership of the original code placed under the > GPL. Subsequent modifications being derivative products.
But there's no way to verify that the code is indeed an original creation of whoever is listed under @author, and not a derivative work of something else. > I am not a lawyer, but by dropping the copyright information, I highly > suspect that will be a breach of the license. AFAIK GPL itself does not protect attribution. It allows (optionally) to add clauses protecting attribution, but does not require it. I wonder though, given that Git has all the change history including authorship, what is the need to duplicate that information in the source code (and risk the two getting out of sync)? And if we are not considering Git logs to be part of the distribution, we're already violating this GPL clause: You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. Since you can commit the change (thus causing original work to be modified) without such notice, except for Git metadata. We obviously consider Git metadata to be enough in this case, why not in any others? -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
