[fpc-devel] LGPL vs BSD

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Fri, 4 Aug 2006, schreef Jonas Maebe:

> 
> On 4 aug 2006, at 14:41, Daniël Mantione wrote:
> 
> [change the license]
> > You can do this. Of course, you need agreement within the FPC team, but
> > there is no reason why we would need a GNU like copyright assignment
> > procedure for that.
> 
> No, you need approval of all copyright holders. Everyone who has submitted
> patches and did not explicitly assign the copyright to one of the FPC team
> members, retains the copyright on the code in that patch

> (to the extent that
> this code was copyrightable in the first place, i.e. it was not simply a
> typo-correction or so -- where exactly the boundary is can only be decided by
> a court on a case-by-case basis).

Exactly, if I make a suggestion to an author of a book to change 
something, I cannot claim copyright on it. Therefore the vast majority of 
patches are not protected by copyright.

Only if a patch adds enough code that it can be considered a "work" as 
specified in the copyright laws, the author of the patch gets rights on 
his work in the compiler.

Daniël