Re: [Evolution-hackers] Unauthorised licence change to e-spinner.[ch]

[Sankar <psankar novell com>]

Hi Christian,

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 15:16 +0200, Christian Persch wrote:
> Hi;
> 
> The commit
> [http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/evolution?limit_changes=0&view=revision&revision=36116] introduced a new copyright header for evolution/widgets/misc/e-spinner.[ch] [http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/evolution/trunk/widgets/misc/e-spinner.c?limit_changes=0&r1=36116&r2=36115&pathrev=36116] above the old copyright header, in which it claims the code is
> a) now licensed under LGPL 2 and LGPL 3, and
> b) now "Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Novell, Inc. (www.novell.com)".
> 
> Both of these claims are false.
> 
> e-spinner.[ch] is derived from ephy-spinner.[ch] from Epiphany, and I
> hold the copyright on much of the code in it. It is licensed under the
> terms of the GPL 2+. As you can see from e-spinner.c's svn history
> [http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/evolution/trunk/widgets/misc/e-spinner.c?view=log], this file was first checked into evolution in 2007, at which time it was almost identical to ephy-spinner except for the rename of the namespace from "ephy" to "e". See the attached diff from ephy-spinner to today's e-spinner after reversal of that rename to observe that the cumulative changes are trivial (not to mention partially bogus), and even if they might justify a "2007-2008" novell copyright they certainly do not justify putting the novell copyright notice above all other copyright holders and to even put a claim to be an "Author" of it!
> 
> Most importantly, I was not asked for permission to re-license this code
> to the LGPL 2 + LGPL 3; nor have I given such permission.
> 


As there are many committers in Evolution sources, we sent out a common
mail to the desktop-devel and evolution-hackers mailing lists. Please
refer :

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-July/msg00065.html 

Also, I have been blogging about the license changes in planet gnome as
well, every time I make a change. http://psankar.blogspot.com/ 

> Please revert this unauthorised license change immediately.

I request you to wait till wednesday (10th September) , within which I
will be able to do some analysis and get back to you. We will revert to
the old state, if we cannot resolve the issue by then. 

> 
> 	Christian
> _______________________________________________
> Evolution-hackers mailing list
> Evolution-hackers gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers

--
Sankar