[PATCH] Simplify copyright/license notice that appears in the binary. (was Re: Copyright message for 1.20.2?)

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 5:53 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:
> I proposed yesterday:
>>> Therefore, my suggestion now is to change this:
>>>  "Copyright (C) 1998-2012 Erik Andersen, Rob Landley, Denys Vlasenko\n"
>>>   "and others. Licensed under GPLv2.\n"
>>>   "See source distribution for full notice.\n"
>>> to this:
>>>   "BusyBox is copyrighted by many authors between 1998-2012.\n"
>>>   "Licensed under GPLv2. See source distribution for detailed\n"
>>>   "copyright notices.\n"
>
> Tito  wrote at 08:01 (EDT):
>> I'm for keeping it simple.
>
> This seems to be the consensus.  I'm therefore proposing the attached
> patch.
>
> Tito  wrote at 16:01 (EDT) on Thursday:
>> This is ok for me if the lawyers ack it.
>
> Indeed, before I posted, I did check with Conservancy's General Counsel,
> Tony Sebro (cc'ed), and he did approve the text as adequate for our
> purposes and a reasonable solution, given other constraints of size.
>
> Tito  wrote at 08:01 (EDT):
>> People that wants to infringe on the license doesn't care
>> anyway.....or will delete them.
>
> Deleting it means they're committing willful copyright infringement
> which in most jurisdictions increase the civil penalties.
>
> Meanwhile, IIRC, the whole point of putting this text in there was to
> catch non-willful infrigers, who don't even bother to remove the notice
> or make any attempt to comply with GPL.  It's still useful for that
> purpose.
>
> ralda at gmx.de wrote at 01:40 (EDT):
>>>> For full desktop installations the few bytes of the full copyright
>>>> usually doesn't matter. As this the full notice shall be the
>>>> default.  On systems where size really matters the maintainer may
>>>> disable full copyright notice in the binary.
>
> Meanwhile, I don't think a "configurable longer" copyright notice does
> us any good, so I didn't include that in my patch.
>
> The patch is attached.  You can also pull it from:
>  git pull git://gitorious.org/busybox/busybox.git bkuhn/new-copyright-notice

Applied, thanks!
-- 
vda