Re: [GNUnet-developers] question on copyrights in gnURL / cURL

[Christian Grothoff]

On 09/14/2017 08:40 AM, Werner Koch wrote:
> Common law (US/UK) allows to entirely sell your copyright; in European
> law you can't sell your copyright.  But the final effect is basically
> the same.
> 
>> don't see that you'd even have a right to require attribution, and you
> 
> Who can take that away?

My understanding of the GPL is that it allows arbitrary modifications,
including removing author attributions. That's why the GFDL has
invariant sections, which in turn has caused Debian to declare GFDL with
invariant sections as non-free. So my interpretation is that if you
contribute to a project under GPL, you implicitly waive your right to
require attribution because of the license. So it's not taken away, it's
given away together with liberating the code. (None of this should imply
that it is morally right to remove attributions.)

>> certainly have no duty to provide it in any particular form either.
>> Besides, Git is good enough for that for anyone who really wants to know.
> 
> The problem with relying on Git is that there is no requirement to
> distribute the repo along with the, say, tarball.  Eventually there will
> be only a tarball with modification outside of Git.  Thus it is
> important to distribute a ChangeLog with the source (the GPL even
> requires such a list of changes not done by the original author)).  A
> ChangeLog derived from a Git log should be sufficient because it allows
> to see who did changes at all.

Yep, but gnurl isn't GPL, it's license doesn't have that clause.  Also,
I seriously hope some of the plans to obsolete it will allow us to
terminate it long before Git becomes obsolete. ;-)

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