Quoting Jon Phillips <jon@...235...>:
hopefully we can maintain our revision history as well.
Actually since a lot of folks seem to have neglected adding copyright statements when they add stuff, and also don't always bother to update the ChangeLog, it's kind of critical. We don't have any other complete record of who did what...
This was brought to my attention recently, and is NOT COOL.
For future reference, the ground rules are basically:
1. Anything more than ~10 lines or so warrants a copyright notice. I think four is the lower legal limit for copyright in the US.
2. If you're not comfortable with simply adding your name and copyright dates to an existing copyright/license notice because of wording/etc, don't edit it, but rather insert your own notice above the existing one (this includes public domain dedications!).
3. The copyright notice does need to spell out which license applies. Generally for us this should be GPL 2(+) or a public domain dedication.
4. Don't add a copyright notice on someone else's behalf; the original author needs to do it for themselves, or submit a patch to do it if they don't have commit access
5. As an author of code, assign the copyright to yourself or your employer (as appropriate), not a fictional "Inkscape" organization. Pseudonyms that have a real person behind them are nominally okay though as long as there's a clear identity and it's something you normally use.
-mental