Re: Copyright assignment

[Chris Toshok <toshok hungry com>]

On Sun, 2004-08-08 at 18:39 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Chris Toshok wrote:
> 
> > copyright assignment needs to address.  "supporting files" means
> > anything that's not program code that must be included in the evo source
> > distribution in order to build it (i.e. .m4 files, Makefiles, glade
> > files, data files used to generate C, etc.).  Libraries clearly do not
> > fall into this set.
> 
> Then there should be no problem adding "not including libraries" to the
> contract text.

Of course not, I just think it's not necessary.

> [fwiw, i don't agree that m4 files, Makefiles, etc are clearly not program
>  code.  I also don't agree that libraries are not necessary to build the
>  application.  where there is disagreement among reasonable people, the
>  contract should be clarified.]

Semantics.  "program code" = code compiled that makes up the binary.
Also, it doesn't matter either way.  If those files contain program
code, they're already explicitly covered by the rest of the text.  If
they don't, they're "supporting files", which are also covered.

I didn't say the libraries weren't required to build the application.
They are simply not required to exist in the source distribution (you
know, evolution-x.x.tar.gz) in order to build it.  And since they aren't
required to exist in the source distribution their copyright isn't
important - only the license governing their distribution matters in
that case.

Novell doesn't require that copyrights are assigned to them by the
OpenLDAP folks for using libldap, nor the Mozilla Foundation for NSS.

Chris