Re: [HACKERS] Readline use in trouble? - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Peter Eisentraut <e99re41@csd.uu.se> writes:
> Regarding which I have a question: at other locations I see (c) 1994-7
> Univ. of California, or even (c) 1996-9 PostgreSQL Global Development
> Team.

> I am not an expert in any of this, but I'm just wondering: when did the
> involvement of the U of C end, when was the Global Development Team (tm)
> formed and do both copyrights exits in parallel?

Judging from the historical messages recently posted, Berkeley had
control of the code up to about '96.  I suppose '94 was the last major
release made from Berkeley.  (Another Berkeley project that I've been
involved with, Ptolemy, has always made a point of updating its
copyright boilerplate to current year just before each major release.
Perhaps the Postgres guys were less punctilious about copyright dates,
but anyway it's clearly been several years since Berkeley was in
charge.)

If we were really doing this with full legal care, we'd probably have
something like this in every source file:
* Copyright (c) 1986-1994*      The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.* Copyright (c)
1996-1999*     PostgreSQL Global Development Team
 

(or whatever the exact date ranges should be).  The Berkeley copyright
will never lapse as long as there is visible Berkeley heritage in the
code, but the Postgres group can also claim copyright on the
modifications and additions we've made.  As long as we are happy with
distributing our work under the BSD license terms, there's no conflict.

Now a lawyer would immediately point out that the "PostgreSQL Global
Development Team" is not a legally existent entity and so has no ability
to sue anyone for copyright violation.  If we thought we might have to
enforce our wishes legally, we'd need to form an actual corporation.
(Perhaps the core team has already quietly done that, but I sure don't
know about it...)

> What if someone contributes something really major and fairly
> independent (say like pg_access) and wants to keep his own copyright
> (with compatible license of course)?

I've noticed that Jan and a couple of other people have put copyright
notices in their own names on files that they've created from scratch,
but I feel uncomfortable with that practice.  The Ghostscript/readline
fiasco illustrates the potential problems you can get into with
divergent copyrights on chunks of code that need to be distributed
together.  My personal feeling is that if you're a member of the team,
stick the team copyright on it; don't open a can of legal worms.

(If we were building in a green field it might be profitable to debate
what that team copyright should be --- but unless we want to start from
scratch, BSD is it, for better or worse.)

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I don't play one on TV, yadda yadda...
        regards, tom lane