Re: more personal copyrights

Tom Lane wrote:
> Jaime Casanova <jaime(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > A few months ago Bruce was doing a hunting of personal Copyrights
> > notices, but i still found a lot of files copyrighted to: Regents of
> > the University of California and other files copyrighted to
> > individuals (ej: almost everything inside src/backend/regex is
> > copyrighted to Henry Spencer)
>
> > there's something we can/need to do about it?
>
> No. The regex code was lifted whole hog from Spencer's package;
> it would be most uncivilized, as well as illegal, to remove his name
> from it.

Right, we never remove copyrights without author permission. If we
can't get their approval, we will rewrite their contribution.

> The case that we are trying to eliminate is where people have put
> individual copyrights on code that was written specifically for
> Postgres. There's no good reason to have such files look like they
> might have a license different from the rest of Postgres. However,
> Spencer's code isn't in that category --- it's also in Tcl, and
> I imagine it was once distributed as a standalone library.

We do allow non-PGDG copyrights in the file, but only where we are sure
that the license is BSD-compatible. For example, the copyright at the
top of src/port/getopt.c probably came from a BSD-based operating
system:

* Copyright (c) 1987, 1993, 1994
* The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

and below this is the BSD license. src/port/erand48.c has:

* Copyright (c) 1993 Martin Birgmeier
* All rights reserved.

which is scary until you see the copyright under it, which seems fine:

* You may redistribute unmodified or modified versions of this source
* code provided that the above copyright notice and this and the
* following conditions are retained.
*
* This software is provided ``as is'', and comes with no warranties
* of any kind. I shall in no event be liable for anything that happens
* to anyone/anything when using this software.

The files in src/backend/regex:

* Copyright (c) 1998, 1999 Henry Spencer. All rights reserved.

have a personal copyright but again there is a BSD-compatible license
attended to the file.

No company has ever asked about these files, I think because the license
below it is BSD-compatible.

What I have been trying to clean up are personal copyrights aren't
explicit about their license terms.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +