Re: more personal copyrights

Hi,

A few months ago Bruce was doing a hunting of personal Copyrights
notices, but i still found a lot of files copyrighted to: Regents of
the University of California and other files copyrighted to
individuals (ej: almost everything inside src/backend/regex is
copyrighted to Henry Spencer)

there's something we can/need to do about it?
I can make a list if anyone is interested showing what files are still
copyrighted to something different to 'PostgreSQL Global Development
Group'

--
Jaime Casanova         www.2ndQuadrant.com
Soporte y capacitación de PostgreSQL

> A few months ago Bruce was doing a hunting of personal Copyrights
> notices, but i still found a lot of files copyrighted to: Regents of
> the University of California and other files copyrighted to
> individuals (ej: almost everything inside src/backend/regex is
> copyrighted to Henry Spencer)
>
> there's something we can/need to do about it?
> I can make a list if anyone is interested showing what files are still
> copyrighted to something different to 'PostgreSQL Global Development
> Group'

I am not sure if we could arbitrarily change the copyright notices
without explicit permissions from the original authors.
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS, Inc. Japan
English: http://www.sraoss.co.jp/index_en.php
Japanese: http://www.sraoss.co.jp

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 1:18 AM, Jaime Casanova <jaime(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> A few months ago Bruce was doing a hunting of personal Copyrights
> notices, but i still found a lot of files copyrighted to: Regents of
> the University of California and other files copyrighted to
> individuals (ej: almost everything inside src/backend/regex is
> copyrighted to Henry Spencer)
>
> there's something we can/need to do about it?
> I can make a list if anyone is interested showing what files are still
> copyrighted to something different to 'PostgreSQL Global Development
> Group'

Henry Spencer probably didn't intend to become a member of the
PostgreSQL Global Development Group; he wrote a regex library, which
we included because the license was sufficiently permissive for our
needs.

Or at least, that's how I understand it.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company

On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 02:27:50PM +0900, Tatsuo Ishii wrote:
> > A few months ago Bruce was doing a hunting of personal Copyrights
> > notices, but i still found a lot of files copyrighted to: Regents
> > of the University of California and other files copyrighted to
> > individuals (ej: almost everything inside src/backend/regex is
> > copyrighted to Henry Spencer)
> >
> > there's something we can/need to do about it? I can make a list
> > if anyone is interested showing what files are still copyrighted
> > to something different to 'PostgreSQL Global Development Group'
>
> I am not sure if we could arbitrarily change the copyright notices
> without explicit permissions from the original authors.

We can't.

What we should probably do is come up with a list of exceptions (Henry
Spencer's regex library, e.g.) and a script to find all non-exception
copyright notices. This will help us keep the copyrights in the code
base to the standard we set.

I can even see this becoming a commit- or push- hook. :)

Cheers,
David.
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Jaime Casanova <jaime(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> A few months ago Bruce was doing a hunting of personal Copyrights
> notices, but i still found a lot of files copyrighted to: Regents of
> the University of California and other files copyrighted to
> individuals (ej: almost everything inside src/backend/regex is
> copyrighted to Henry Spencer)

> there's something we can/need to do about it?

No. The regex code was lifted whole hog from Spencer's package;
it would be most uncivilized, as well as illegal, to remove his name
from it.

The case that we are trying to eliminate is where people have put
individual copyrights on code that was written specifically for
Postgres. There's no good reason to have such files look like they
might have a license different from the rest of Postgres. However,
Spencer's code isn't in that category --- it's also in Tcl, and
I imagine it was once distributed as a standalone library.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:
> Jaime Casanova <jaime(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > A few months ago Bruce was doing a hunting of personal Copyrights
> > notices, but i still found a lot of files copyrighted to: Regents of
> > the University of California and other files copyrighted to
> > individuals (ej: almost everything inside src/backend/regex is
> > copyrighted to Henry Spencer)
>
> > there's something we can/need to do about it?
>
> No. The regex code was lifted whole hog from Spencer's package;
> it would be most uncivilized, as well as illegal, to remove his name
> from it.

Right, we never remove copyrights without author permission. If we
can't get their approval, we will rewrite their contribution.

> The case that we are trying to eliminate is where people have put
> individual copyrights on code that was written specifically for
> Postgres. There's no good reason to have such files look like they
> might have a license different from the rest of Postgres. However,
> Spencer's code isn't in that category --- it's also in Tcl, and
> I imagine it was once distributed as a standalone library.

We do allow non-PGDG copyrights in the file, but only where we are sure
that the license is BSD-compatible. For example, the copyright at the
top of src/port/getopt.c probably came from a BSD-based operating
system:

* Copyright (c) 1987, 1993, 1994
* The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

and below this is the BSD license. src/port/erand48.c has:

* Copyright (c) 1993 Martin Birgmeier
* All rights reserved.

which is scary until you see the copyright under it, which seems fine:

* You may redistribute unmodified or modified versions of this source
* code provided that the above copyright notice and this and the
* following conditions are retained.
*
* This software is provided ``as is'', and comes with no warranties
* of any kind. I shall in no event be liable for anything that happens
* to anyone/anything when using this software.

The files in src/backend/regex:

* Copyright (c) 1998, 1999 Henry Spencer. All rights reserved.

have a personal copyright but again there is a BSD-compatible license
attended to the file.

No company has ever asked about these files, I think because the license
below it is BSD-compatible.

What I have been trying to clean up are personal copyrights aren't
explicit about their license terms.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +