First step towards replacing the GPL copyright headers in each file with the
appropriate haddock notes. The GPL is still noted, and if needed, haddock can
point to a LICENSE file.

1 patch for repository http://darcs.net:

Tue Jan 24 07:59:37 EST 2012  Will Langstroth <will@langstroth.com>
  * replace copyright message with module doc
  This header creates haddock documentation, and the GPL license is noted

Attachments

• patch-preview.txt
• replace-copyright-message-with-module-doc.dpatch
• unnamed

On 24/01/2012 14:07, Will Langstroth wrote:

> First step towards replacing the GPL copyright headers in each file with the
> appropriate haddock notes. The GPL is still noted, and if needed, haddock can
> point to a LICENSE file.

Here's the new proposed header:

> +-- Module      : Main
> +-- Copyright   : 2002-2003 David Roundy
> +-- License     : GPL
> +-- Maintainer  : darcs-devel
> +-- Stability   : experimental
> +-- Portability : portable

I much prefer this to the old one! A few thoughts:

 - Shouldn't the maintainer field should be darcs-devel@darcs.net ?

 - When doing other files, be alert to the licenses, as some are BSD3
(when made entirely by contributors who have agreed to that)

 - It would be nice to stop maintaining the Copyright header in each
file, because it never stays up to date. The darcs history of the file
would be much more accurate, albeit still imperfect. There was a thread
that sort of discussed this in passing a while ago:

http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2010-August/024768.html

but I'm not entirely clear what the legal position is. I'd like to just
change the Copyright to something like "See COPYRIGHT file" and then try
to document the position more clearly there, but I'm not sure if that is
legally a good idea.

Anyway, the last two points are certainly not issues with this specific
patch.

Cheers,

Ganesh

Update to the earlier patch, which listed the maintainer as "darcs-devel"
instead of darcs-devel@darcs.net.

2 patches for repository http://darcs.net:

Tue Jan 24 07:59:37 EST 2012  Will Langstroth <will@langstroth.com>
  * replace copyright message with module doc
  This header creates haddock documentation, and the GPL license is noted

Tue Jan 24 20:18:09 EST 2012  Will Langstroth <will@langstroth.com>
  * make maintainer the dev mailing list email

Attachments

• patch-preview.txt
• replace-copyright-message-with-module-doc.dpatch
• unnamed

Ganesh Sittampalam writes:

 > but I'm not entirely clear what the legal position is. I'd like to just
 > change the Copyright to something like "See COPYRIGHT file" and then try
 > to document the position more clearly there, but I'm not sure if that is
 > legally a good idea.

This was discussed recently on the emacs-devel list.  The FSF legal
staff's position for Emacs is that a header like 

Copyright <list of years> <owner>

for each owner (in Emacs's case, almost all files are owned by the
FSF, so it's just one line) is appropriate.

Note that Emacs copyrights are reregistered every year, so that Emacs
can take advantage of statutory damages and the like.  The FSF legal
position may be based on that kind of consideration.

>
> Note that Emacs copyrights are reregistered every year, so that Emacs
> can take advantage of statutory damages and the like.  The FSF legal
> position may be based on that kind of consideration.
>

Emacs is kind of the flagship of the GPL, isn't it? Stallman is the
original author, and I seem to recall songs written about emacs (maybe that
was GNU software in general, though). You would know better than I would.
I'm more of a BSD3 man, myself.

At any rate, the haddock documentation encourages the same copyright format
you mention, so we're likely in the clear.

Attachments

• unnamed

Most of the files in the root of src/ are covered. At least, the Haskell
source files. For those of the files lacking any indication of author or
license, I consulted `darcs annotate`, and assumed GPL.

1 patch for repository http://darcs.net:

Wed Jan 25 21:39:14 EST 2012  Will Langstroth <will@langstroth.com>
  * Haddock headers
  Add Haddock headers to the files at the root of src/

Attachments

• haddock-headers.dpatch
• patch-preview.txt
• unnamed

Accepting it.