[Enigma-devel] Copyrights

[Daniel Heck]

There seems to be some consensus that we should at least try to apply
for official GNU membership.  All in all this seems to be a good idea,
and it's certainly less work than completely renaming the project.

The first thing we have to clarify before we apply are the copyrights
and licenses of various files that come with Enigma. Everything above
~15 lines of code counts as a significant contribution to which
copyright law applies.  Of course, there has always been the implicit
assumption that, since you're contributing to a GPL'd project, your
files fall under the same license.  But as far as I see it, we need to
make that explicit: every file should (if possible) contain a copyright
and a short license notice.   

Petr's, Nat's, and Ralf's levels for example already do carry the
necessary notices.  But even my own levels don't... :-|  If you have CVS
access, please do that yourself. If not, please send and email to me or
to the list explicitly stating your license terms (GPL or less
restrictive).  LEVELS WITHOUT A CLEAR COPYRIGHT NOTICE WILL NOT BE
INCLUDED IN FUTURE RELEASES!

As to the copyright notices in c++ source code: I you feel you've made a
significant contribution (see above) to a particular source file, please
do add an appropriate copyright notice.  Consult the FSF's web pages if
you need the formal rules for writing copyright notices :-)

Note: The copyrights stay with the individual authors of levels and
pieces of code.  I'm not talking about assigning the copyright to me or
to the FSF -- this is not necessary.


I know it's a little annoying, but I don't think there is a way around
this. 

Daniel


-- 
Daniel Heck
http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~dheck/