[Kde-games-devel] Copyright notices

[Josef Spillner]

Am Dienstag, 10. Februar 2009 05:33:16 schrieb Frederik Schwarzer:
> What's the preferred notice here?
> &copy; <this_year> The KDE Team
> &copy; <this_year> The KDEGames Team
> &copy; <this_year> <current_maintainer>

That's a good question, because this is where lawyer understanding might clash 
with reality. In reality, everything beyond trivial contributions may count as 
copyrightable. For example, the FSF would require a written disclaimer for 
everything above 10 lines of code.
For pragmatic reasons, I usually go for leaving the original authors in there, 
listing all the years they were contributing, and then putting a generic team 
copyright for the years since then for maintenance work (plus maybe major 
contributors). This might not be legally valid, but then again so is probably 
no other combination, because the only real way to find out is to look at SVN 
history.

My suggestion is to take this to the kde-licensing list where real lawyers 
read, because IANAL :-)

> And btw, is it ok to replace the copyright headers in source files if the
> license and the names are kept the same? (e.g. if the current header takes
> too much space due to many empty lines?)

Yes, modifying is even desirable to make them more consistent. Please use the 
templates from:

http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy

Josef