new project, old license

[Gary W. Swearingen]

des at des.no (Dag-Erling Smørgrav) writes:

> The license normally says "BY THE FOO PROJECT AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS" or
> "BY ITS AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS" in which case I'd consider the author
> of the derivative work a contributor and leave it at that.  IANAL.

I'm not commenting on the guts of that, just a side issue it prompted.

IMO, writing only "By The Foo Project" is just an ill-advised way of
writing "By contributors to the Foo Project", and both are of weak
merit in forming legal contracts between the many IP owners and users,
when many contributions have no associated evidence of authorship, let
alone ownership.

But it's worked in the past and so should work in the future (to
borrow a phrase from NASA).  And it's too late hard and too late to
bother changing, so what's a project to do?  Nothing.  I DO wish that
"contributors" or at least "project and contributors", was used more
often than "project", which is all I remember seeing in FreeBSD.


P.S. Recent patches of the Linux kernel are supposed to have a claim
of authorship in the form of a "From:" line in the msg _body_; I
expect that it will have many authors like "Joe Blow" instead of "Joe
Blow's Employer", the author in law, and they'll eventually try to
make it clear they want a claim of ownership instead.

P.P.S. I recently had a fight with my conscience when I considered
adding a copyright notice to one of my contributions, per the .gov
website I had just read.  It seemed to me that each significant (?)
change should add a notice to the CVS for posterity, to be removed by
the next one, probably keeping another one or more in the file with a
more generic, though less righteous, notice.  The individual notices
would not be worth much as notices, but it would tend to encourage
contributors to go on record as to who owns their contribution.
(I lost my fight and went along to get along. :)