[oi-dev] Copyright for contributors - not in files, OI branded zones, binary compatibility

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 07/19/13 11:43 AM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> No.  When the copyright is in file, it becomes far easier to validate ownership, and far harder for an infringing party to claim ignorance.  Technically no copyright notice at all is*required*, but having the notices gives additional impact when a case is brought forward against an infringing party.

A much longer explanation of this, written by licensed lawyers who serve as
legal counsel to many major open source projects, is posted at:

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html

The system Garrett describes for illumos is covered in the Best Practices as
the "Maintaining file-scope copyright notices" method - since illumos uses
a license with file scope (the CDDL), and individual files are copied out of
it into other projects for their ZFS & Dtrace implementations, it fits well.

(Like Garrett, I don't speak for OI, or anyone but myself, currently in my fifth
year of serving on the Board of Directors of an open source foundation (X.Org),
and past the decade point of managing our corporate code contributions to X.Org,
and thus exposed to far more of the legal issues around open source than is
healthy.)

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-              alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Engineering - http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc