On 6/8/12 9:07 AM, "Sam Ruby" <ru...@intertwingly.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Kalle Korhonen
> <kalle.o.korho...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Roy T. Fielding <field...@gbiv.com> wrote:
>>> I fear we are miscommunicating again.
>>> Only the copyright owner is allowed to (re)move copyright notices
>>> or permit others to (re)move them on the owner's behalf.
>>
>> Interesting, why is that? Is it so by the law?
>
> It would be helpful if somebody could point out the actual words in
> the copyright headers being discussed. I may have missed it.
I will describe the situation in more detail below.
>
> In this case, Adobe isn't hard to reach here. We should seek their
> opinion, and respect it.
Adobe legal's opinion will be included in the detail below.
>
> If Adobe wishes us to retain the headers, my opinion is that we should
> evaluate the impact that such a request will have on the community,
> and either follow their request or decline the contribution.
>
> If Adobe collectively takes the time to understand our position and
> agrees to moving it, there are a number of ways that this can be
> expressed clearly. I still maintain that having an Adobe employee do
> such a move would be the simplest and clearest way, but other ways are
> possible too.
Here is a more detailed description of the situation:
An individual starts a company and writes some code.
Macromedia acquires that individual and the code. Each source file has a
header:
/*
* Written by Individual
* Copyright (c) 1998-2003 Individual's Company
* All rights reserved.
*/
Adobe acquires Macromedia. The code is incorporated into a larger product
via Macromedia and Adobe engineers. New files in the larger product have
Adobe copyrights, but the acquired code must retain the original copyrights
according to Adobe Legal.
The individual leaves Adobe. Adobe wishes to donate the code to Apache.
The individual's agreement upon acquisition allows Adobe to donate such code
and it is donated via a software grant.
Adobe Legal says that Adobe engineers can replace the Adobe copyrights with
Apache headers, but Adobe engineers still do not have the right to replace
the individual's copyrights in the other files, and [1] says that Apache
folks should not either.
So, this is not really an Adobe issue. Adobe does not own the copyright to
the files in question and therefore cannot agree to moving it, but Adobe did
have permission to donate the code. The individual involved is willing to
allow the copyright to be moved, and we asked here to find out how formal
the permission referred to in [1] must be.
[1] http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html
--
Alex Harui
Flex SDK Team
Adobe Systems, Inc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui
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