[openbeos] Ticket #1222

  • From: "Matt Madia" <mattmadia@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 10:33:27 -0400

A few days ago  i started working on http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/1222
,  "check if AboutHaiku lists an acknowledgment for all packages"

I've done enough to learn I don't know which course of action to take in
several cases  : P

Generally, there's three areas where acknowledgments must be accredited:
source files,
provided along with binary distributions,
and advertising materials.

For this task, I'm assuming the source files to be properly credited.
Binary redistribution's credits could be placed somewhere in or alongside
the included documentation and essentially need to be reproductions of the
entire copyright and disclaimer block found in the source code.
The credits for advertising materials seems to contain text that would also
be appropriate for AboutHaiku.

As far as I can tell, there is no specific requirement to include the text
in AboutHaiku.

I plan on creating two groups of text.
One file that contains short blurbs to be used for advertising and
optionally for AboutHaiku.

An entire directory of individual text files of copyright notices.
I'm not certain about the ideal hierarchy and nomenclature
eg,  legal/NetBSD.copyright ,  NetBSD.disclaimer,   NewOS.copyright,
NewOS.disclaimer,  LGPL.copyright, LGPL.disclaimer
eg,  legal/NetBSD/copyright,  disclaimer    legal/LGPL/Copying,

Now onto the questions ...

Some files contain multiple versions of the same license.

In these the acknowledgment quotes can differ.

For eg,
http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/haiku/haiku/trunk/src/libs/compat/freebsd_network/compat/sys/bus_dma.h
Both copyrights are NetBSD and differ in the acknowledgment quote.
*      This product includes software developed by the NetBSD
*      Foundation, Inc. and its contributors.
                    vs.
*      This product includes software developed by Christopher G. Demetriou

*      for the NetBSD Project.
In this type of case, are we allowed the freedom to condense the latter
quote into "and its contributors." of the first?


Across multiple files, there may also be versions of the license that
differs in the clauses.
--currently i cannot re-locate examples of this.
--but imagine lib/src1 has a NetBSD license with clauses 1,3, and 4  and
lib/src2 with a NetBSD license with clauses 1,2,3 and 4.

Would i need to reproduce each copyright notice individually or simply
reproduce the one with more clauses?


On a similar note, some groups use the same copyright notice for multiple
years.
Aside from that, the copyrights notices are exact duplicates.
eg,  lib/src4  has Copyright (c)  1997   ,lib/src5 has   Copyright (c)
1998    , lib/src6 has Copyright (c) 2001

How would this situation be handled?
reproduce the earliest date,   the most recent, or create a custom "Multiple
Copyright (c) through the years 1997 - 2001"

-mmadia

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