Hi Galen:
Thanks for the quick response :-)
On Fri Jul 31 10:27:30 2009, GMCHARLT wrote:
Show quoted text> Hi,
>
> On Thu Jul 30 16:32:54 2009, FREQUENCY wrote:
> > I'm curious what the new copyright is (in particular, we need years of
> > copyright, names and e-mail addresses of the copyright holders).
> > Hopefully it will include information about past releases. Hopefully
> > this information can be extracted from your Changes file...
>
> I'll be pushing out another release (0.93) to add the names. Is "(c)
> <dates> Ed Summers and contributors" sufficient for Debian's purposes,
> or do you need a complete list of names? Note that we historically
> haven't bothered to require contributors to formally assign copyright to
> Ed or any other entity.
We have various packages that have done that, I think even copyrighting
it to Ed Summers should be OK. On the other hand I'm not a lawyer.
Looking at the changelog it looks like you could also assign copyright
for at least 1999-2000 to Bill Birthisel <wcbirthisel@alum.mit.edu>
Another issue (and unfortunately I don't have the answer to this) is
determining who holds copyright on contributed patches.
If you keep track of this in a VCS it might be useful to check the logs
to see who has contributed, too. In general it's helpful to have
copyright information because legally speaking you'll need it if you
ever decide to relicense the software (you need all copyright holders to
agree). I would also assume that anyone contributing that doesn't
explictly add a copyright statement is OK with just assigning copyright
to the original author, Ed Summers, but the Berne Convention disagrees,
and that's where things get a bit complicated.
In any event, Copyright <years of copyright>, Ed Summers <email@address>
is better than nothing. Preferably if you have a ballpark figure (ie,
some years) that major contributions were made by others, then that
would help (and the changelog is good for that). Unfortunately, it looks
like even Ed Summers might not have been the original author, or perhaps
he asked someone else to upload the package. Going back as far as CPAN
had packages (BACKPAN would have more versions), here is the list of
people who have released various versions of XML-MARC:
Bill Birthisel, 0.25 0.3 0.4 (1999-2000)
Ed Summers, 0.66 0.7 0.8 0.81 0.83 (2004-2006)
Joshua Ferraro, 0.82 0.84 0.85 0.86 0.87 0.88_1 0.88 (2006-2007)
Galen Charlton, 0.91 (2009)
I suggest you might be able to use those to get some sense of the
copyright years, so hopefully that helps :-)
Cheers,
Jonathan
