Re: [Texi2html-bug] Re: FSF assignment?

[Derek Price]

Hi Karl,

Karl Berry wrote:
> And on that front ... are the contributions by Peter Pentchev, Peter
> Moulder, and/or Eric Sunshine legally significant?  Those were the other
> names I saw in the ChangeLog.  I've asked Karl (Heinz Marbaise).
> 2003-12-16  Peter Pentchev  <address@hidden>
> 2000-09-14  Eric Sunshine  <address@hidden>
> 2000-09-11  Eric Sunshine  <address@hidden>
> 2000-04-08  Peter Moulder  <address@hidden>
> 2000-03-26  Peter Moulder  <address@hidden>

I just went through the ChangeLog, and based on that, it looks like one
of Peter Moulder's could be significant, and there are another four
contributions from Moulder in the form of ChangeLog entries initially
attributed to other authors but with opaque sub-entries like:

    * texi2html.pl: Incorporated changes of Peter Moulder


Scanning for "([Cc]hanges?|([Ff]ix|[Pp]atch)(es)?)  *(from|by|of)" also
brings up an additional patch from Sunshine and these additional names:

2008-08-08 Reinhold Kainhofer reinhold at kainhofer dot com
2005-03-29 Jose Fonseca jrfonseca
2002-06-25 Ville Skyttä <address@hidden> through
           Adrian Aichner <address@hidden>
2000-09-14 Eric Marsden <address@hidden>
2000-08-16 "joseph" <address@hidden>
2000-05-31 Richard Y. Kim <address@hidden>
2000-04-13 Teun Burgers


I was able to confirm that Pentchev's, Reinhold's, and Fonesca's changes
were all minor cleanup, using the CVS logs and verifying against the
diffs of their changes.

The same method shows that Ville & Adrian's patch was very large but was
almost all reformatting and recasing of html tagnames from upper to
lower case for XHTML conformance, with a few other very minor changes
for XHTML conformance.  Despite this patch's size, I think this could be
classified as minor?

The CVS logs are not available for any of the older contributions,
including Sunshine's and Moulder's.  When I couldn't contact Olaf
Bachmann in 2001, I started the new repository by importing the
then-current release of Texi2HTML and lost the original history.  Based
on the ChangeLog entries (all more complete than the aforementioned
Moulder entries), I would say that Eric Sunshine and all the additional
names I grepped look likely to be minor contributors, but I can't
confirm without the original history.

So, in summary, there is a good chance that assignments are required
from Peter Moulder, I'd like you to confirm that a HUGE change that is
almost all recasing and reformatting doesn't qualify as legally
significant in regards to Ville Skyttä's change, and assignments
probably are not required from Eric Sunshine, Eric Marsden, "joseph",
Richard Y. Kim, and Teun Burgers, but it might be nice to verify that
against the original history if it can be dug up (maybe Olaf still has
access to it?).

Regards,

Derek
-- 
Derek R. Price
Solutions Architect
Ximbiot, LLC <http://ximbiot.com>
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