GPL about grafx2 HOT 9 CLOSED

Currently, all the greeting & help data is compiled into grafx2.dat, impossible 
to 
edit manually. It's normally generated by compiling and running a Pascal 
program in 
dat/. I'm really considering putting all these constants in a C constant file, 
compiled into the exe with gcc.

I'm considering a modification of the help text that shows updated status and 
fixes  
errors (ex: e-mail addresses and site of original authors are obsolete. I don't 
know 
if their snail mail addresses are still current.) 

As of r158, the text is now directly modifiable in a C header.
Note that the title "splash screen" may need an updated text, too.

I've been checking gnu.org : GPL compliance needs a bit of work :)
The way I understand it, all source files should begin with the following 
comment block:

    Copyright 1996-2001 Sunset Design (Guillaume Dorme & Karl Maritaud)
    Copyright 2007 PulkoMandy ([email protected])

    This file is part of GrafX2.

    GrafX2 is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    GrafX2 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with GrafX2.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

If some files are identical to the original source code distribution, they 
don't need
the "Copyright 2007" line.
The way I understand it, the copyright holders are the only ones who have the 
right
to act if somebody doesn't respect the GPL license. In my opinion, the more the
better; and also real names are more significant than e-mail addresses.

I would stick with GPL2 (did not take time to read the v3 and carefully 
understand 
it). I'm totally again the "any later version" part, imagine someone takes over 
the 
FSF and make some proprietary licence called gpl v4 :)

No problem for adding my name (and yours if you want), i'm Adrien Destugues.
And i think it would be Copyright 2008 :)
Anyways, a licence change require acceptance from all the people listed in the 
copyright list, so, the more people we add, the more it will be difficult to do.

All that needs some wise thinking. However, Karl and Guillaume released grafx2 
under 
the GPL2, so, we can only use that or gpl3. I'm fine with that, but please, 
remove 
this "any other version" thing :)

Honestly, it's new for me too. Ok for GPL v2 only, it's the one I had packaged 
in the
beta archive, anyway.
The copyright date is about the "publication". Since Googlecode's svn is 
public, all
the files revisions from r0 to r44 are under your copyright since 2007.

Mostly done in r217 and r218.
In the program itself (Splash screen and About page), I wasn't sure what to 
display 
for Copyright 2007... pulkomandy only? "the grafx2 project team" ?
I settled for "the contributors", as it's what written in Firefox' About screen.
Pulkomandy, it's up to you to decide if it fits.

"The Grafx2 project team" or something like that sounds good for me, and more 
classy.
Also, please center the text on this window, it is offset to the right. I also 
find 
it quite empty, maybe a little message would be nice, for example "BETA VERSION 
- 
USE WITH CAUTION" for betas and "Please report any bug you may find." for 
releases. 
The original code has support for that, i think...

About the team, in fact, i added some people to the project but they did not 
made 
any contributions. You desserve the copyright to your changes, of course. The 
only 
time it becomes important is if we ever plan to do a licence change other than 
the 
"any other version" from the GPL. Then we need to ask to all the copyright 
holders 
if they agree. So, please avoid adding too many people out there.

> if we ever plan to do a licence change
I don't imagine this very likely since we are using X-Man's and Robinson's work
already, and the 2001 sourcecode was GPL-v2-or-later. We can add our work and 
license
the resulting package under GPLv2-only, as it still meets their requirements.
However, a radical license change would require their consent. (I really don't 
see
how you could extract your own work from the whole.)

Arguably, the only things over which we have exclusive copyright are the ones we
create from scratch. I didn't check VERY carefully and kind of slapped 
"Copyright
Sunset Design" everywhere, but if you're sure some files have your exclusive 
"touch",
don't hesitate to fix my wrong copyright notice.

> please avoid adding too many people out there.
It's you who decide who contributes :)
Feel free to fix the text, I wasn't there until last month so I don't know who 
does
what. I just hope the current state is more "right" than the absence of 
copyright
notices (which makes the license undefendable).
Note that on sources, I only added my copyright line on files I remember 
modifying
significantly.

Everything cleaned up. Ready for release on this aspect :)