Copyright notice referring a company other than Sun

[Phil Race]

Mark,

I think it likely matters to (say) commercial licensees who also get the 
JDK code
to know that Sun has a copyright in the file, or even just use the 
binaries created
from those sources, which is why I think we'd always want it to be present.

And I don't understand the apparent legal nuances of this :
 >they aren't granted the actual copyright, just a grant to the rights 
associated with it

-phil.

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> 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
>
>