Subject: Re: A few contributor's questions

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 08:19:24 -0800

Hi,

David Kastrup wrote:

>       builtin/blame.c merely states
>
> /*
>  * Blame
>  *
>  * Copyright (c) 2006, Junio C Hamano
>  */

I think you planned to make substantial changes, so

> /*
>  * Blame
>  *
>  * Copyright (c) 2006--2014, Junio C Hamano and others
>  * Licensed under GPLv2.  See Git's COPYING file for details.
>  */

towards the end of the series (or squashed into some patch that makes
significant changes) looks fine to me.

Also keep in mind that you don't need a copyright notice to own
copyright, that it would be crazy for someone to claim you've assigned
copyright on your changes without an explicit reassignment, and that
libgit2's git.git-authors file that keeps coming up includes a comment
with a heuristic for delving into the history to find the authors of
some code.

[...]
> Permissable-Licenses: GPL Version 2 or later

Wouldn't a signed message on your website or some other public place
(e.g., the mailing list) do the trick?

Or a sentence in a commit message saying

 "I'd be happy to have these changes relicensed under the GPL version 2
 or later."

sounds fine to me, at least.

Thanks and hope that helps,
Jonathan