Re: Does NetBSD require a copyright assignment?

Paul Goyette <[email protected]> Thu, 9 Oct 2025 02:02:37 -0700 (PDT)
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.devel.repository,gmane.os.netbsd.advocacy
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Thu, 9 Oct 2025, Martin Husemann wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 08, 2025 at 08:56:49AM -0400, Charles wrote:
>> Does NetBSD require a copyright assignment?
>
> No, only a suitable license.
>
>> I am struggling to find code that was contributed directly to NetBSD
>> source tree where the author holds their copyright.
>
> I guess the details are shady to mere mortal developers who have not
> been at law school :-)
>
> Everyone with a commit bit is member of TNF, so having TNF hold the copyright
> is quite natural. And usualy developers just copy the boilerplate from
> some existing file and just modify year(s) and name.

Note that there are instances where the author retains an individual
copyright.  There is a file in $SRC/distrib/notes/common/legal.common
which contains attributions.  I can't at the moment find this in an
installed system, only in the sources, and the file seems to be
generated by scanning the rest of the source tree using a perl script.


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