How to add missing copyright and license headers to sources?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On February 12, 2007, mETz wrote:
> Now I have the following questions:

IAMNAL

> - Is it ok to add the BSD license text from
> http://developer.kde.org/policies/licensepolicy.html to all source files
> that lack a license header and remove the COPYING file (IIRC license files
> should not be scattered around kde svn and the ones in kdelibs should be
> referenced)

that's correct

> - Whom to add as copyright holders? I wasted my whole last night to find
> previous authors for a file including their full name and email and then I
> manually picked the ones that did major work on a file and added them with
> their respective commit timeframe. Later I was told on IRC that adding
> copyright for persons other than me without asking them is probably not a
> good idea

well, it -is- their copyright. whether they are in the file or not, they have 
claim to it. you aren't exactly granting it to them =) sending everyone you 
added an email letting them know that this has happened in the noatun source 
code would be a good idea (i'd just CC them all to save multiple mailings) 
and should be enough.

> slighly less important:
> - How safe is the BSD license if you're just coding for fun and don't want
> to get sued in case you run into a copyright or patent issue by pure
> accident (i.e. you didn't know before that you infrige a patent or read
> something that has a restrictive copyright)?

as good as any other. which is to say, not much.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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