Don Armstrong writes:
> On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > We now have a LICENSE file and I hope to have addressed GPL 2a with
> > the Copyright file.
>
> The only concern I'm really aware of is that the Copyright file
> doesn't address GPL ยง2a. I think it will suffice for Debian's
> purposes, but the mplayer development team really should start
> indicating in the files themselves that they've been changed and who
> has changed them. [Such an audit trail is really, really, usefull if
> someone decides to pull a SCO, for instance.]
You have a point here. I'll look into this.
Can you give me some good examples of file headers indicating changes?
IMHO the GPL is not overly clear on this:
a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
Giving a complete changelog at the top of a file is not feasible IMHO.
I'll give you an example. During my copyright/license audit I found
the following header in the file osdep/lrmi.c in the MPlayer sources.
/*
Linux Real Mode Interface - A library of DPMI-like functions for Linux.
Copyright (C) 1998 by Josh Vanderhoof
You are free to distribute and modify this file, as long as you
do not remove this copyright notice and clearly label modified
versions as being modified.
This software has NO WARRANTY. Use it at your own risk.
Original location: http://cvs.debian.org/lrmi/
*/
We had modified it, but it was not labeled as such. Clearly a license
violation but one easily remedied. So I added the line
Modified for use with MPlayer, see the CVS log for details.
to the header. I consider this sufficient in this case. The GPL
requires giving dates of changes. I consider this close to impossible
as it would more or less require adding the date and log message of
every commit to that file. This is what CVS is for. IMHO referring
to the CVS log and/or giving the date of the first change should
suffice.
Regards
Diego
P.S.: No need to CC me, I'm subscribed.
