Re: Simplify license headers

Intellectual rights include: non-property rights (right to authorship, right to author's name, etc.); property rights (exclusive rights or copyright); A very interesting question appears: Who own the copyright for the PHP source code? Is Nikita right when he says that the copyright on PHP belongs to all the co-authors who contributed to the development? Best regards, Ruslan On 28/01/2019, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote: > >> I would like to make two changes to this header: >> >> 1. Change "PHP Version 7" line to just "PHP", to avoid the necessity of >> updating this for >> new major versions. I don't think the version information here is >> particularly useful to >> anybody. > > I don't mind that much, but I don't see any issue with keeping it the way it > is either. It does look nicer the way it is now IMHO, and the cost > associated with changing it twice a decade is, well, not very substantial. > >> 2. Remove the "Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group" line. Apart from >> requiring a >> yearly update, this line is actually complete misinformation, because the >> PHP group >> does *not* hold the copyright for the PHP source code. This would require >> a copyright >> assignment agreement on behalf of all contributors, which we do not >> collect. >> >> We could also just drop the header entirely, I'm just proposing these two >> changes as >> the path of least resistance towards getting the "annoying" parts >> removed. > > I'm no lawyer, but I do believe a case can be made for claiming that a > person putting code into files with the header 'Copyright (c) XYZ', is in > fact implicitly assigning copyright to XYZ. So while it's not as strong as > an explicit copyright assignment, and while it was never tested in court > (and hopefully never will be) - I do see value in keeping it. I certainly > don't see a reason to change it after 20 years where it didn't seem to > bother anybody, unless there's a strong reason to do that, which currently I > don't see. > > Zeev >