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Re: Copyright question.


When you modify any libc source file, you must leave any non-FSF copyright
notices and permission text completely unmodified.  When you copy any
significant part of one libc source file into into another source file, you
must copy any non-FSF copyright notices and permission text verbatim into
the new file.  When there is an FSF copyright notice, you should add the
current year to its list of years.  If there is no FSF copyright notice,
and you are adding significant code beyond what was copied, then you should
add a new FSF copyright notice that looks like the ones you see in all the
other libc files that have no non-FSF copyrights.

Sun and Stephen Moshier both have retained their copyright ownership of the
libm code we have in libc.  That's why their names will always be there.
The copyrights for your contributions are assigned to the FSF, so if you
are adding anything copyrightable (i.e. significant, which means anything
more than a few lines) then the only copyright being asserted is the FSF's.

Many people put a "Written by" or "Contributed by" line right after the
copyright line (or a "Converted to foobar support by" or whatever makes
sense for code that's been copied and extended).  That is not a copyright
and has no legal meaning.  The copyright notices (such as Moshier's) cannot
be removed or changed legally.  The notes are just text in the file that we
could choose to change or remove, and we just choose to leave them in there
since that's what those contributors seemed to want went they gave us the
code.  You're welcome to put such notes in your submissions if you like.
It's up to you.  (Many people write them; I never do, but that's just
because the last time I put my name or email address near the top of a
source file, I was still getting highly confused email from novice
programmers in Korea fifteen years later.)

As for reformatting, usually it's better avoided.  If the code you've
copied is still substantially similar to the old code, then you'll be doing
yourself a favor not to perturb it unnecessarily even with whitespace
changes, so that diffs between the two, and the diffs for future changes to
the code you copied from, are easier to read and see how to apply to your
code.  That's why we didn't reformat all the Sun libm code when we took it
in.  If you are really rewriting all the text so the similarity is lost to
diff anyway, then use GNU conventions.  (The one file you posted is already
indented in the GNU style.)


Thanks,
Roland


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