[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: [gnu.org #250073] wikimedia, make a fork and the GPL

[NSK]

On Friday 02 September 2005 23:36, Sebastian Wieseler wrote:
> We can also have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version:
> "This wiki is powered by MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2005 Magnus Manske,
> Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Moeller, and others."


Personally in my derivative work of MediaWiki (Oklahoma) I think it would be 
ok to use the following notice in the source files and the about text: 
"Oklahoma, copyright (C) 2005 by Nikolaos S. Karastathis, is a derivative 
work of MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2005 Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee 
Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Moeller, and others" or something like 
that. Plus, I would add all necessary GPL (2 and later versions) notices 
required. Then I would add in some readme file that my copyright is limited 
only in the code I wrote, and that the rest is copyrighted by the others et 
al.

If I can find the "others", that would be good, but I would have to look into 
years of CVS logs (but again, how could I know that the committer is really 
the author of the committed code?). I don't think it's easy, and in my view 
if these "others" really wanted to get credit they would have been included 
in MediaWiki credits a long time ago. But I have no problem putting their 
names in the notice if I can find them easily.

-- 
Nikolaos S. Karastathis (NSK)
Personal Homepage at http://nsk.wikinerds.org/
http://www.wikinerds.org/