[Koha-devel] FSF address in copyright notices

[Lars Wirzenius]

On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 09:51 +1300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> Most Koha source files contain a copyright notice and license at the
> top, which refers to the old address of the Free Software Foundation:

While fixing that, I found some problems, listed below. Before I submit
a patch to fix the addresses, I would like to have some idea what to do
about the problems, just in case I can fix them in the same patch.

        * INSTALL.fedora7 -- this has a copyright statement, but no
        copyright license information. Is it still relevant? Fedora 7 is
        pretty old by now, and no longer support, as far as I can tell.
        Do the instructions work for modern versions of Fedora? If not,
        can they be updated? If not, the file should probably be
        removed. If it is still relevant, or can be made relevant, a
        copyright license should be added.

        * t/smolder_smoke_signal -- this is not under the GPL-2, but the
        license seems compatible with it, in case that is necessary, so
        thist should be OK. I am bringing it up just to make sure it is
        actually OK, not just in the happy universe in my head.

        * misc/cronjobs/check-url.pl, misc/cronjobs/cloud-kw.pl -- these
        have a copyright license of GPL version 2 only, whereas most of
        Koha has version 2 or later. Is this a problem? Can we get the
        author to relicense to version 2 or later, to keep it compatible
        with the rest of Koha?

Everything else is GPL version 2 or later, if it has a copyright
statement at all. For now, I have ignored files that do not have a
copyright statement. Some day perhaps it would be worthwhile to check
that everything does have a copyright statement and license.

Another issue I noticed is that few if any files have their copyright
statements updated. Many files have copyright timestamps from 8 years
ago, for example, but have been modified since. I am not sure if this is
important enough to fix, but on the whole it would probably be good to
be careful about these things. Fixing ten years of code base for this is
going to be a pain, though.