I am an author of an Open Source project, which is released under GPL2. I start to work on it alone for 2 years.
In every of my source code files, I attach the following information on the top of it.
/*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
* the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at
* your option) any later version.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
* WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
* General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
* along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
* Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
*
* Copyright (C) 2009 Yan Cheng Cheok <yccheok@yahoo.com>
*/
Now, the project is getting attention from the public. There are increasing number of programmers are joining in. I was wondering :
(1) When there is a programmer modify my original source code file, do I need to add his name in the copyright section. But, with the increasing number of programmer, isn’t that will keep the header almost unreadable?
For example :
- Copyright (C) 2009 Yan Cheng Cheok , John
(2) If a programmer add a new source code file, the source code copyright shall belong to whom? Me? Or him?
(3) If there is a mixed copyright source code in a project, say,
A.c, B.c, C.c source code file is copyrighted Yan Cheng Cheok
D.c, E.c, F.c source code file is copyrighted John
Will there be an issue? Say, in the future, John decide to switch D.c, E.c, F.c using different license, and Yan Cheng Cheok doesn’t agree with it…… Who will have a final say then?
In order to avoid this type of conflict, shall I enforce all commited source code shall be copyright under me? But, I also do not want the new developer feel that his work is not being credited properly.
(4) Is there really to have “year” in the copyright information? If I put 2009, does that mean in 2010, I am no longer holding the copyright?
I am not a lawyer, but I have been looking into this.
As an author of software, be it a patch or a new bit of functionality you hold full copyright to your source code. You can decide how to license it or who to license it to.
When someone contributes source to your project you should at least get an email from them saying what terms their code is licensed under. For example, if you have an MIT project, and someone contributes a patch that is GPL, you are in a pretty big pickle. To accept it you would have to re-license your project under the GPL.
So, first things first:
Lots of open source projects would like the leverage to change open source licenses, say for example you want to re-license under GPLv3. You will have to contact every contributor to do that, some of them may be unreachable, and again you will be in a bit of a pickle.
To combat that many large open source projects have a JCA (Joint Copyright Assignment), which in tech speak mean: “All your contributions belong to us” (See for example suns contributor agreement: http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/sca.pdf)
When a JCA is in place your source can have the simple copyright: “Copyright (C) 2009 Yan Cheng Cheok yccheok@yahoo.com” because you are the copyright holder.
If there is no JCA in place I think stuff is a little messy, you need to amend the files and place the right contributor names on the right files. Or better still only maintain a single License.txt and have all the acknowledgments in one spot.
So to avoid all this hassle the easiest thing is to:
The year on the copyright doc does not mean it expires in the subsequent year.