Re: KDE/kdebase

On Monday 26 July 2010 14:07:14 Alex Merry wrote:
> SVN commit 1154884 by alexmerry:
> 
> Revert r1154600: Modified (some) 'About' windows to carry legally
> enforceable Copyright messages. Also looks better than '(c)'. ;-) Also
> fixed a few typos where I noticed them.
> 
> 
> Please don't do huge sweeping changes of KAboutData things without talking
> to the authors first.  I'm sure they don't appreciate having their names
> removed from the about dialogs.
> 
> Note that
> (a) the unicode copyright character is no more enforcible than (c)
> (b) while "the KDE developers" is not a legal entity, neither is "Dolphin
> authors" (c) it was decided a while back that we don't care about whether
> the copyrights in about dialogs are meaningful, since they can't hope to
> encompass everyone who holds copyrights on the application code or any of
> the libraries it is linked to; the copyright headers in the source files
> are the important ones.
> 

Just to re-iterate previous discussions, both (c) and the unicode symbol 
carry little or no legal weight, it's the full word "Copyright" we need to 
use.  

Changing the About dialog to have just "Copyright" instead of "(c)" or the 
Unicode symbol is OK imho, and does look nicer and is more easily translated.  

Changing the names and dates is not OK without confirming with the authors.

Could we come up with some more generic wording when there are too many 
authors to list, perhaps something like:

  Copyright 2003-2010 The xxx Developers
  All copyrights in this work belong to their respective authors,
  please refer to the relevant source code files for the full details.

Basically something to tell people this isn't the real copyright statement 
and isn't to be relied upon.  Even then the years will get out-of-date if 
people forget to update them, but there's little we can do about that.

Cheers!

John.