Copyright notice referring a company other than Sun

[Mark Wielaard]

On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 10:17 -0700, Phil Race wrote:
> So whilst I'm not a lawyer, I'd say that means that all code contributed
> to OpenJDK under SCA can have a full Sun copyright - and probably should
> have that explicitly in the source file. Not just for the new portions,
> but for all of it.

Also not a lawyer, but I think you are right, if Sun would want that.
But it would be enough for Sun to add their own copyright notice if they
want to. And Sun is most likely not entitled to remove any existing
copyright statements in contributions being done under the SCA since
they aren't granted the actual copyright, just a grant to the rights
associated with it (plus patent and moral rights). Meaning that the
copyright itself stays with the contributor. This is different from
other such agreements, which do assign copyright, like the FSF
agreement. The SCA is just a shared rights agreement, not a copyright
transfer/assignment.

We could ask a lawyer of course. But for the public OpenJDK project it
seems that, whatever the nitty-gritty legal details, it isn't a problem
at all having multiple copyright notices. If you go through the sources
you will note that there are lots and lots of additional copyright
statements in the files next to Sun's copyright statements.

In that respect it isn't really an issue for the public project (unlike
what Sun does with their granted rights when not distributing the
contributions under non-free terms and wanting to register any such
rights). And that is a good thing, it tracks the different contributors
and shares the glory a bit in public. IMHO.

Cheers,

Mark