[sane-devel] xsane copyright

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Ralph,

littlesincanada writes:

> Hi,
> Would it be prudent to contact Oliver Rauch regarding his stance on
> future copyright and how he would like attribution to be documented from
> now on in subsequent versions?

I suggest contacting Oliver off-list and keep at least me in the loop
via Cc:.  You may want to add Allan Noah and Gerhard Jaeger (Cc:d), the
other SANE Project owners.

> Has he effectively assigned the code to the SANE project?

If you're talking copyright assignment, then no.
If maintenance, then yes.

> As we make updates, I would like some clarification as to how the
> copyright notices (both in code and visually to the user) should be
> properly updated.

As for the code, Oliver has been pretty good at documenting copyright
claims (as far as I can tell from a simple `git grep -i copyright`).
For any significant changes you or the SANE Project makes to the code,
I'd simply *add* a similar copyright claim, i.e.

  Copyright (C) 2019 <copyright_holder>

to the files that are changed.

As for user notifications, you probably want to show the union of the
copyright claims for all of the XSane code only and not include any of
the claims from generated and/or copied files (think autofoo).

> It is right and proper that Oliver be recognised as the original author
> of course, but I think some clarification on the code base's current
> status and ownership is in order.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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