[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Replace "Fabrice Bellard" with "the FFmpeg developers" in the banner

[Olivier Galibert]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 07:44:51AM +0100, Luca Abeni wrote:
> Jason Garrett-Glaser wrote:
> [...]
> >>>FFmpeg is a collective effort so allowing a single name in a banner is
> >>>not nice/fair towards the community of developers, also this is more
> >>>correct for example when adding a new ff* tool (yes I have in mind
> >>>ffprobe).
> >>Well, I do not think that copyrights can be changed like this ;-)
> >>IMHO, a change like this one is acceptable only if proposed by Fabrice
> >>(or at least approved by Fabrice).
> >
> >Headers do not determine who has copyright over the file; they're
> >simply informative.  Changing a header does not change the copyright
> >of the file.
> 
> From a legal point of view, you are of course right.
> But, right now there is a program that prints "Copyright (c) 2000-2010
> Fabrice Bellard, et al."; after this patch, it will print a different
> informative message. This is legal, but completely impolite (IMHO).

It may even be illegal, see GPL-2 2c.

  OG.