[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: [gnu.org #250073] wikimedia, make a fork and the GPL

[David Turner via RT]

On Fri, September 2, 2005 5:28 pm, NSK via RT said:
>
> REPLIES GO TO REQUESTORS BY DEFAULT.
>
> <URL: http://rt.gnu.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=250073 >
>
> On Friday 02 September 2005 23:36, Sebastian Wieseler wrote:
>> We can also have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version:
>> "This wiki is powered by MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2005 Magnus
>> Manske,
>> Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Moeller, and
>> others."
>
>
> Personally in my derivative work of MediaWiki (Oklahoma) I think it would
> be ok to use the following notice in the source files and the about text:
> "Oklahoma, copyright (C) 2005 by Nikolaos S. Karastathis, is a derivative
> work of MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2005 Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber,
> Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Moeller, and others" or something
> like that. Plus, I would add all necessary GPL (2 and later versions)
> notices required. Then I would add in some readme file that my copyright
> is limited only in the code I wrote, and that the rest is copyrighted by
> the others et al.
>
> If I can find the "others", that would be good, but I would have to look
> into years of CVS logs (but again, how could I know that the committer is
> really the author of the committed code?). I don't think it's easy, and in
> my view if these "others" really wanted to get credit they would have been
> included in MediaWiki credits a long time ago. But I have no problem
> putting their names in the notice if I can find them easily.

Yeah, you don't have to go through a lot of work here -- copyright notices
frequently don't include all copyright holder, and that's OK.