Re: Please ship changelogs in your tarballs

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 13:33 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le dimanche 03 octobre 2010 à 10:48 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi a écrit : 
> > if you're referring to the 2.a clause in the GPLv2, i.e.:
> [snip] 
> > then the section is referring to the licensee, i.e. people
> > redistributing the program under the terms of the license, not the
> > original authors of the program itself; in this case, the Debian
> > developer applying distribution patches and thus modifying the copy of
> > the program.
> 
> I think this interpretation is valid only for programs for which one
> single entity owns all the copyrights. Since GNOME doesn’t request
> copyright assignment, it would still be needed.

clause 2.a comes into effect when you're redistributing a Program after
*you* changed it.

as soon as a patch is included in the upstream source it becomes part of
the Program (or Library). the author of the patch does not redistribute
the code in question.

and, again, a ChangeLog file does not imply compliance with section 2.a
of the license. I'd argue that most open source projects would be in
blatant violation of that section, if it were meant to be taken as a
requirement for every maintainer, instead of a requirement for every
distributor.

> > *if*, on the other hand, you want a ChangeLog because it makes your life
> > as a packager easier (for some unknown reason) then you should probably
> > ask for a Gnome Goal to add the autogeneration of the ChangeLog from the
> > Git commit log to every GNOME project. the patch is trivial and I'm
> > pretty sure it could also teach people a thing or two about auto-tools.
> 
> For the packager’s needs, the NEWS file is enough. For everything else,
> there’s the repository. I’m more worried about legal issues.

again, I'd strongly suggest to ask a lawyer in this cases; Luis can
probably give a hand.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi