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

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

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

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   -- bkuhn