[Incubator] Transfering Code Copyright - restart

[rich at richsteele.org]

Quoting Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com>:

> The GRASS project has lots of files which are labelled:
>
>   * COPYRIGHT:    (C) 2000 by the GRASS Development Team
>
> If we aren't arrangement assignment should these be corrected to list the
> original author and/or some other "real" copyright holder?  Does it affect
> this decision that many of the files were originally in the public domain
> from CERL?
>
> I feel ... uncomfortable ... having these files listing an impossible
> (from a legal point of view) copyright holder.  But on the other hand, I'm
> really unclear on what the appropriate resolution to this would be.

Well, the copyright statement is technically incorrect, so I'm also  
uncomfortable with the status quo.  I think the right policy is to NOT  
include a copyright statement at the top of a source file except where  
it is third party code included in the distribution that comes with  
its own notice.  I've mentioned here before that perhaps one way to  
look at this is that the individual developers own the copyright in  
their individual contributions/files/etc., but that OSGeo, as the  
entity that organizes and oversees development, compiles  
distributions, etc. would hold the copyright in the "collective work".  
  In this way, there would be an OSGeo copyright notice in the main  
"LICENSE.txt" file, but no copyright headers in individual files.   
Individual files would contain license information, but not  
necessarily copyright information.

If this makes no sense (which I suspect is likely), have a look at  
Cliff Schmidt's work over at Apache, which recently introduced this  
policy:
http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html.

And regarding public domain, if those works are in the public domain,  
they are no longer copyrightable and may be freely used without need  
for a license.