Re: A few contributor's questions

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 31, 2014, 16:19 UTC
Message-ID: <20140131161924.GA4332@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <8738k44808.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>

Hi,

David Kastrup wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>       builtin/blame.c merely states
>
> /*
>  * Blame
>  *
>  * Copyright (c) 2006, Junio C Hamano
>  */

I think you planned to make substantial changes, so

Show 6 quoted lines

> /*
>  * Blame
>  *
>  * Copyright (c) 2006--2014, Junio C Hamano and others
>  * Licensed under GPLv2.  See Git's COPYING file for details.
>  */

towards the end of the series (or squashed into some patch that makes significant changes) looks fine to me.

Also keep in mind that you don't need a copyright notice to own copyright, that it would be crazy for someone to claim you've assigned copyright on your changes without an explicit reassignment, and that libgit2's git.git-authors file that keeps coming up includes a comment with a heuristic for delving into the history to find the authors of some code.

[...]

> Permissable-Licenses: GPL Version 2 or later

Wouldn't a signed message on your website or some other public place (e.g., the mailing list) do the trick?

Or a sentence in a commit message saying

 "I'd be happy to have these changes relicensed under the GPL version 2
 or later."

sounds fine to me, at least.

Thanks and hope that helps, Jonathan