Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Two question which I have to pass on

[Karl Berry]

    The gphpedit author wants to place copyright and license notices in
    the files that he is copying from other projects to make it . He
    says he got the authorization from the previous authors to do so and
    that the gtkscintilla project is not being worked on anymore. I
    believe it is neither lawful

If they gave him permission, I don't see that there's any problem.

    nor has any point to do so anyhow,
    because it would be probably placing the wrong copyright. 

I don't see why, necessarily.

    What gets me is how does anyone know when the true copyright date
    is?

In the absence of omniscience, we all do the best we can: research
sources, etc.  Legally, a "best effort" is not simply discounted.  Plus,
according to what we just learned, just the date of last modification,
or even the current year if it's in a public hosting system (since it's
immediately and permanently published), would be sufficient, legally.

If anything, it seems better to me to have the intended copyright be
explicitly stated in our files.  Anyway, if his project requires the
files, it's irrelevant whether we host them or not, as we talked about
previously, so there is nothing gained by "hiding" them.

karl