LYNX-DEV Copyright notices, -help, -version, -options revisited

[Mike Brown]

        http://www.hyperreal.com/~mike/pub/lynx-help.html

At this URL I have temporarily placed a complete overview of
the discussion from 3 months ago regarding the proposal I 
made for the reorganization of the 'lynx -help' output.

This proposal prompted a discussion about copyright notices
and the copyrights held on Lynx. Many suggestions were made
and Fote ended up calling it all "seriously misguided,"
although he did end up changing the copyright notice in the
'lynx -version' output to something that is arguably less
incorrect than what is in the vanilla 2.7.1 code, yet is
still not (IMHO) ideal.

My original proposal was completely lost in the melee
and to be honest at this point I don't care much about it
anymore, but feel obligated to see it through!  Could all
who are interested please read over the proposal and 
respond to me privately with any last comments before I
wash my hands of it all?

Anyway I did promise to report on how the Apache group treats
their copyright issues.  I finally got word back from Brian
Behlendorf on that:

"We made up the name, called ourselves the 'Apache Group'
(which still does not exist in any legal sense), debated
which copyright to use (BSD? GNU? etc) and then slapped it
on.

"Insofar as it's not a legal group, it's entirely a
meritocracy. People who do work are respected and can set
the agenda, basically. When/if we form a legal group then
we'll have a board of directors and a set of policies
regarding how decisions are made, but we don't have that
currently, and it hasn't been a problem. We do have a
process for how code changes are made, but even that is
highly decentralized.

"We haven't had any challenges yet, but we all realize the
necessity to form a more formal group, primarily for the
purpose of protecting all our asses against litigation
should someone decide they want to take legal action, for
whatever reason, against 'the Apache Group'. It does help
that our copyright is very very loose. Basically, anyone can
take and use our code even for commercial software so long
as they credit us and don't try to use our name for
marketing purposes." 

(Also note that the copyright notices are peppered throughout the  
Apache server source code, and they do acknowledge NCSA where
appropriate.)

Mike
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