[En-Nut-Discussion] RFC: Copyright of trivial code

[Bernd Walter]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 02:34:09PM +0100, Harald Kipp wrote:
> On 3/19/2011 5:14 AM, Thiago A. Corrêa wrote:
> 
> > What is wrong with simply sticking with revised BSD license? It's
> > compatible with both closed source usage and GPL
> 
> There are cases, where even the less restrictive BSDL may not fit. For 
> such cases the user should feel free to change the license to whatever 
> he likes.
> 
> Example: Someone may decide to take over several simple Nut/OS headers 
> to save some typing work. Right now, he must publish the copyright 
> notice somewhere together with his code. If he wants to avoid this, he 
> needs to type his own version, which, if it's a trivial file, will 
> probably look almost the same. This is idiotic.

Strictly speaking I would agree with you.
On the other hand it is so impractical, that I've never seen every
copyright in any BSD derived binary product.
Usually it is sufficient to name the major license(s) and point to the
originating sourcecode, which of course contains every individual
copyright notice.
If you say that a product is based on Ethernut Version X and the source
can be retrievd at URL foo every license.
This is allowed in the BSD license because the sourcecode can be
considered as a special kind of documentation.

> If I, the original author, did not feel that a file contains any mental 
> effort, I do not want to force others to retype it just to avoid any 
> copyright violation.

A BSD license won't require it to be retyped as explained above.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd at bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.