Provenance spreadsheet...

[Frank Warmerdam]

Julien-Samuel Lacroix wrote:
> I think we agreed on a standard header, but is it somewhere in the wiki? 
> Also, files added by me, Assefa and Daniel, have the MS/MIT license 
> except for that line:
> 
> DM license:
>  * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
>  * in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
> 
> MS license:
>  * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be 
> included in
>  * all copies of this Software or works derived from this Software.
> 
> Is it critical? What should we do?

Julien,

I would suggest a representative of DM Solutions (Assefa would be fine for
this) authorize us to change the license to match the MS license so it
will be consistent everywhere.

> Since don't seem to be able to modify the spreadsheet myself here a some 
> addition:
> I (JSL) was, with Assefa (YA), the primary contributor of mapcontext.c. 
> Zak James (ZJ) was the primary contributor of mappdf.c and I think Sacha 
> Fournier (SF) contribute the first version of maptemplate.c (I may be 
> wrong with that one) for the HTML legend, but he's gone since 2004. The 
> header in maptemplate.c does not refer to him probably because the 
> header was added by Frank when he added a header to all files.
> 
> What should we do with people that are gone?

Files written by folks who are no longer involved should be
reviewed briefly by someone else to ensure there is no obvious
issues.

> My last question is about the Copyright years. Most files have a year of 
>   creation and try to have the year of the last update, but it's not 
> up-to-date. Daniel used to update all the files on the first days of 
> January, but it's not systematic. Should it be?

It is not particularly important to update the copryright headers for the
full range of years of edits to a file.  I would suggest we disregard this
to keep things simple.  The only value in updating them is that it puts off
the date at which the source will fall into the public domain.  But I think
that is already 50 years after the last author dies or something like that
anyways.  So it is not relavent in the software world.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org