Re: copyright notice format

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

Am Son, 2002-12-08 um 08.49 schrieb Mark McLoughlin:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 02:31, Christian Neumair wrote:
> 
> > Sorry for not informing you.
> > We had a discussion on gnome-i18n:
> > http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2002-September/msg00097.html
> > http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2002-November/msg00230.html
> > http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2002-December/msg00001.html
> > After reading *many* articles on copyright laws I finally decided to use
> > the variant described in 2002-December/msg00001.
> > I'm sorry for having omitted all maintainers. I've learned my lesson and
> > it won't happen again (unfortunately I commited similar fixes to other
> > modules). I'm very unexperienced and was obviously to motivated.
> > Feel free to revert the change.
> 
> 	I'm all for coming to an agreement on the format
> for copyright notices across GNOME and going around fixing
> it. I also see why this *first* came up on gnome-18n, but
> I don't see why that gnome-i18n is the right place for
> coming to a final decision. This (gnome-hackers) seems
> like a more approriate forum.
> 
> 	So, could you sum up to use all the reason why
> you think this format is better than any others so it can
> be discussed here ?
I hope we all agree on the fact that having more than one way of
refering to authors is a bad thing as it produces many unnecessary
strings which all have to be translated and because we should keep
consistency.
It's really annoying if you have to translate strings like
  Copyright (C) 1999-2002 Red Hat
and
 (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Red Hat, Inc.
in one product or module.
So we had to find a consistent pattern:
My first proposal was
 (C) <first-year-code-was-published>-<last-year-code-was-published> <author>
as the inital author holds the copyright and (C) is much shorter thanlot
of  "Copyright" and of course than "Copyright (C)". Furthermore, (C) is
officially recognized as an identifier for copyright.
After reading some articles on copyright laws and copyright in general I
decided to use
 (C) <first-year-code-was-published> <author>.
In some products / modules (like gnome-panel) there occur a great many
copyright strings and the first proposal requires the maintainers to
change the strings every year which is very annoying because it produces
new strings for the translators. Additionally, I think in this case the
following is valid, too: The shorter the better.
Next I did was using Free Software Foundation_, Inc._ or Red Hat_, Inc._
as a reference to companies. This makes clear that no individual holds
the copyright on that software. Just have a look at the strings before I
commited the changes. Some read "The Free Software Foundation" (, Inc.
missing), some "Red Hat Inc." (missing comma) and so on.
I hope you now understand a bit why I started the discussion on
gnome-i18n.
I'm still sorry for all the mess I aroused and deeply sorry for the
maintainers I bugged but I can't say anything more than that I'm not
very experienced and wanted to push those efforts.

regs,
 Chris

-- 

  Jeder erbärmliche Tropf, der nichts in der Welt hat, darauf er stolz
seyn könnte,
  ergreift das letzte Mittel, auf die Nation, der er gerade angehört,
stolz zu seyn.

	Artur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena