Re: [libmicrohttpd] [Taler] Moral rights: credits

[Christian Grothoff]

Hi Bruno,

Are you aware that for Taler and GNUnet we have a copyright assignment
to GNUnet e.V. and that the GNUnet e.V. (or Taler Systems SA) is listed
as the copyright holder in each file, and that those should/would be the
ones enforcing the (A)GPL anyway?

However, your point is slightly more valid for GNU libmicrohttpd / GNU
libextractor. Still, there we have the *dominant* author(s) names in the
copyright header as well -- and I'm not proposing to remove _those_.

So for example, if the file does say on top:
/*
  This file is part of PACKAGE
  Copyright (C) 2007-2018 MAJOR AUTHOR
*/

does it really help to have an additional authors below? I'd think
having a very tiny number of authors (or organizations) listed in a file
makes it much easier for *those listed there* to enforce the GPL than if
you have the kitchen-sink of everybody who ever added a line.  So in my
view, we should of course make sure that those lines list people or orgs
willing and able to enforce the (X)GPL, but having _also_ the @authors
comments should not be required.

Do you agree?

Best,

Christian

On 10/7/19 8:06 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi Christian,
> 
>> we would still have
>> both the top-level AUTHORS file and the attribution via the Git history.
>>
>> So, please do let me know if you (for whatever reason) would object to
>> removing the per-source file @author attributions.
> 
> Mails sent to gnu-community-private on 2019-09-25 14:10 GMT and
> 2019-09-27 12:09 GMT give a convincing argumentation that, in order
> to enforce the GPL in the EU, for contributors who are not doing
> paid work, the contributors must be mentioned in the respective
> source files.
> 
> Removing all @author lines from the source code makes the GPL
> practically unenforceable in the EU. Look at the Christoph Hellwig
> vs. VMware case for an example. He failed because the court was
> not willing to wade through git logs and 'git annotate' pictures;
> they want something simpler than that.
> 
> Bruno
>

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