Extending the licensing policy: BSD license for cmake files

[Shaun Reich]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Harri Porten<porten at froglogic.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Sep 2009, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
>
>> How does repeating the term "Copyright", once spelled out and once
>> written as "(C)" (which is not acknowledged by the Copyright laws),
>> emphasize the copyright statement.
>
> Note I am talking about mortal readers rather than copyright laywers here.
>
> The symbol is well known and eye-catching. The word spells things out and
> provides a precise meaning. Whether it's redundant, not-acknowledged
> ascii-art or even void is one thing. Unless some laywers tell us that it
> *hurts* I wouldn't stop an author from decreasing the chance of someone
> overlooking the notice or being able able to claim so.
>
>> The circle C symbol is an alternative to spelling out the word
>> Copyright. Either one uses the symbol (as abbreviation) or one
>> uses "Copyright", but one never uses both in the same copyright
>> statement.
>
> How do you mean by "one never uses"? I have personally seen hundreds of
> copyright owners do so (grep your /usr/include for also recent samples) and
> won't challenge the prudence of laywers from Nokia, Apple and the like.
>
> Harri.
>
> P.S. There are still countries who have not signed the Berne Convention btw.
> In those the word Copyright alone might not be sufficient.

I agree that the symbol is eye-catching, as symbols/visual cues are
very often more quickly recognized than mere words, especially when
those words are grouped together with many others, in varying letter
casing ;) . I also don't think it is enough of a "problem", or even a
"problem", so as to justify the removing of any....until I hear it
from a lawyer, I don't see any reason why it *should* be removed or
refrained from, and I will not discontinue using it because somebody
thinks it is redundant. Sure, you don't need to make the header
symmetric through the uses of asterisks. I see the (c) as essentially
preference, in the same sense that I enjoy prettying up my headers, as
opposed to posting a big blob that is uglier or less legible than the
code itself... =)

As for the "one never uses both" statement, I have seen very few
source code headers that do not use both...in KDE and others.

-- 
Innumerus Gratiae,
Shaun Reich