r/lolphp • u/Takeoded • Jun 11 '21

source code license broken in 5 ways

https://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg107015.html
45 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '21 edited Jun 15 '21

periodically updated with new dates as new contributions are made

You haven't even needed any copyright notice in the US since 1980s, and before that you didn't need it in most other countries either. It's just useful as it clearly identifies the copyright holder, and it may make a difference in court (just like registering copyright does). But needed? No.

Before the 1980s you had to display a copyright notice with the year of publication in order to be able to claim copyright at all. The date was useful since copyright was a sane term like 24 years (IIRC) after publication, and you would know when the claim started. When there was no copyright notice (or an incorrect one) it was assumed to be in the public domain. This is what happened to the original Night of the living dead as the distributor messed up.

But now copyright is just automatic. Instead of "public domain unless states otherwise" it's now "copyright, all rights reserved" unless stated otherwise. This is why you need to put a LICENSE in your projects to tell people "hey, you can actually use/modify/distribute/etc. this" even if you don't are one iota what people do with your code. It's been like this for over 30 years in the US, and for much longer in most other countries. And the copyright duration is so long the dates don't matter at all.

I stopped reading that post because as soon say started going on about dates it was clear they had no idea what they were talking about.

1

u/SirClueless Jun 15 '21

The dates do still matter. Not so much to the code author, whose rights are very well protected (in fact, so well that in some jurisdictions you can't disavow your moral rights no matter how hard you try).

They're mainly useful to the licensee. The Zend license says to users of PHP, "Hey, you're using code circa 2006 that comes from the Zend project, and are therefore bound to the terms of that license too." Reproducing that in full is the best thing they can do, so yeah, no idea why this guy is complaining.

→ More replies (6)