[PATCH 1 of 6 A2 series] pathencode: add _lowerencode function

[Laurens Holst]

Op 09-10-12 01:07, Adrian Buehlmann schreef:
> On 2012-10-08 19:35, Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
>> Sure.
>>
>> On 2012-10-08 19:17, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
>>> On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 4:52 AM, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com
>>> <mailto:adrian at cadifra.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>      This code was originally published by Bryan O'Sullivan
>>>      <bryano at fb.com <mailto:bryano at fb.com>>
>>>      on 2012-09-10 <tel:2012-09-10> as part of a bigger patch, which
>>>      wasn't included.
>>>
>>>
>>> Please don't change the attribution on patches you didn't originate. I
>>> don't want to have to explain to Facebook's legal team why your name is
>>> on a commit even though Facebook owns the rights to the code.
>>>
>>> If you'd like me to extract a hunk of a patch and resubmit it by itself,
>>> just ask.
> Some further notes on the legalese involved here.
>
> Your dislike has been well noted here.
>
> But:
>
> If you send a patch to this list, you publish it. You've thus created a
> derived work, which was published under the GPL too. I am thus free to
> take and bend your patch in whatever ways I please.
>
> I don't have to wait with my modifications until your patch hits the
> main Mercurial repo. Because your patch may not even reach the main repo
> ever.
>
> I "own" the code as much as you or Facebook do.

No, not really; there is a significant difference between owning the 
copyright and being licensed by the copyright owner to modify the code 
under the conditions of the GPL. GPL does not reassign copyright (in 
fact in many countries copyright always belongs to the author or his 
employer and can not be reassigned).

Having the patch’s author reflect the author of the code makes it easier 
to determine who authored it. Of course you do attribute in the 
description, however that is less obvious and can’t be easily used to 
perform queries such as “retrieve all changesets by author X” or 
“retrieve a list of source code contributors” or “find all lines touched 
by author X that have not been modified since”.

These queries are useful in various situations. E.g. if the Mercurial 
code base would need to be relicensed, they need to contact all 
individual copyright owners to agree to it. Or if person X contributed 
code even if his employer never gave permission for that, and all code 
authored by that person would need to be removed.

So although technically you are permitted to create a derived work under 
the terms of the GPL, there are advantages to “version controlling” 
these modifications or asking the original author to make these 
modifications in a code review. As an additional benefit, this will also 
probably be appreciated by the original author, rather than someone 
taking your code and running away with it.

~Laurens