One thing that bothered me about the license block at the start of each source file is that it only states the year 2011 while many, if not all, source files have changed during this year.
So I decided to take a closer look at the licensing of meandmyshadow and my conclusion is that it's quite a mess.
Here's a list of things that should change:
- All copyright notices only cover the year 2011
- Only three people are given copyright, even code that isn't written/contains no code written by them.
- The copying permission text points to a non existing file (LICENSE.GPL)
- I doubt the copying permission text is right/valid.
Let me clarify the last two points, here's the current header (email addresses removed):
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
/****************************************************************************
** Copyright (C) 2011 Luka Horvat <>
** Copyright (C) 2011 Edward Lii <>
** Copyright (C) 2011 O. Bahri Gordebak <>
**
**
** This file may be used under the terms of the GNU General Public
** License version 3.0 as published by the Free Software Foundation
** and appearing in the file LICENSE.GPL included in the packaging of
** this file.
**
** This file is provided AS IS with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE
** WARRANTY OF DESIGN, MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
**
** You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
** along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
**
****************************************************************************/
As you can see in the first paragraph of the copying permission text on the third line you see "... in the file LICENSE.GPL included ...".
Now we compare this text to the one(s) on the gnu gpl site (link)
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
This file is part of Foobar.
Foobar 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 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Foobar 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 Foobar. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
So what should we do?
We must fix these problems, give copyright to the rightful copyright holders and update the year(s) (luckily we can look this up in the svn commit history).
But can and may we change/fix this without causing any legal issues?
My biggest concern is that we might have given some people copyright over the code and now plan to "take it away".
I hope someone with knowledge on this subject can help out.
Thanks in advance.