Updating license and copyright in file headers

Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com
Tue Apr 21 10:40:27 CDT 2009


On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 01:19:25PM +0200, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:33, Giorgos Keramidas
> <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
> > I would definitely sign paperwork to assign copyrights of any changes to
> > a legal entity whose explicit goal is to keep Mercurial free software.
> 
> We might be able to leverage the SFC for that, I guess?

We could, but it's not really necessary. Not having copyright
assignment is actually a better guarantee: changing the license to
something non-free is actually harder.

For the record, when we talked with the bzr folks about a possible
merger, the condition that sunk the deal was assigning our copyright to
Ubuntu to allow proprietary versions. That would have been hard for us
to do even if we actually wanted to sell out.

Copyright assignment also can act as a barrier to project
contributions. See gcc for a long history of fairly large examples.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.


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