DRAFT document on coding conventions in kde libraries

[Henry Miller]

On Friday 10 March 2006 08:24, Nicolas Goutte wrote:
>On Wednesday 08 March 2006 23:44, Lauri Watts wrote:
> > "Copyright" out in full and/or (preferably and) use a real copyright
> > symbol ©
>
> I am not sure about using the copyright symbol alone, as it is UTF-8 only,
> while "Copyright" can be read by any ASCII-compatible encoding. (That is
> different from a book where the result is written and does not depend on an
> encoding to read.)

I'm not a lawyer, but last I checked (in the early 1980s!) the word copyright 
had meaning only in English speaking countries, while ©has meaning in all 
countries (or at least all countries that honor copyrights). 

Given that UTF-8 is not banned in KDE sources, and as already pointed out 
required for some names anyway, we should instead ban any editor that cannot 
at the very least keep UTF-8 encoded letters, even if they cannot edit such 
themselves.   It sucks for those who prefer an editor that doesn't support 
UTF-8, but legally I don't think we have a choice.

Note that there is nothing wrong with someone stripping UTF-8 out of a file, 
using their own editor, creating a patch, and then editing the patch so that 
the UTF-8 isn't removed.   Since UTF-8 should only be used on lines that list 
either authors and/or copyrights, this work around isn't quite as bad as it 
sounds.   However anyone doing this will need to be extra sure their patch 
works correctly.