Re: man-pages-6.14 released

[Carlos O'Donell]

On 5/9/25 8:14 AM, Andries E. Brouwer wrote:
> Hi Alejandro,
>
> > > I wonder about the legal status of such a change.
> > > There is ownership of the pages, and a license that allows
> > > others to do certain things.
> >
> > I also wonder about it.  We discussed it for several (~3) months, and I
> > documented links to the discussion in the commit message:
> >
> > commit 9f2986c34166085225bb5606ebfd4952054e1657
> > Author: Alejandro Colomar <alx@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Date:   Fri Apr 11 02:19:48 2025 +0200
> >
> >      *, CREDITS: Unify copyright notices
> >      
> >      Link: <https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/jpin2dbnp5vpitnh7l4qmvkamzq3h3xljzsznrudgioox3nn72@57uybxbe3h4p/T/#u>
> >      Link: <https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-in-open-source-software-projects>
>
> So I read this last link, and see
>
> "Don’t change someone else’s copyright notice without their permission
> You should not change or remove someone else’s copyright notice unless
> they have expressly (in writing) permitted you to do so. This includes
> third parties’ notices in pre-existing code."
>
> The main topic of that link is how one should document new contributions,
> and writing "by the contributors of the foo project" is OK for new stuff,
> of course provided the new contributor agrees.
> In my opinion it is illegal to change existing copyright notices,
> unless you get permission from all people involved, which seems unlikely.

I agree with Andries.

This is also my interpretation, you cannot remove these entries without
express permission from the copyright holder.

In glibc we did not remove any copyright notices, but *added* under DCO
"Copyright, The GNU Toolchain authors."

Example:
   1 /* Map in a shared object's segments from the file.
   2    Copyright (C) 1995-2025 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
   3    Copyright The GNU Toolchain Authors.
   4    This file is part of the GNU C Library.
   ...

--
Cheers,
Carlos.