Hi!

Samir Saidani <saidani at info.unicaen.fr> wrote:
> Hello goran !
> 
> goran at krampe.se writes:
> 
> > Now, the whole point with being able to track *indefinitely* is a simple
> > one: code ownership
> >
> > That code is copyrighted by you and it is vitally important for open
> > source projects to keep track of where code comes from. Just see the
> > whole SCO vs Linux shebang.
> >
> > So no, I don't think it is fine to simply "forget" old dev ids. That is
> > a bad thing. Hopefully it is now clear why I think we need to "think a
> > bit" before we start changing dev ids all willy nilly. Ok?
> 
> Yes, you raise a central point : code ownership. I don't say that we
> must forget old dev ids, because most of people in the domain of
> opensource (and beyond of course) think that it is very important to
> say that they are the author of a piece of code. A large part of the
> structure of our society is determined by our will to possess.  But it
> implies complexity, e.g. the complexity of different licences, the
> problem of compatibility between different opensource licences,
> etc... For me, it sounds strange and not economic. Maybe simplicity is
> in the anonymity... Perhaps we have to think deeply to understand why
> we want to copyright our code, particularly in the context of the

You are mistakenly thinking that "anonymous" code is not copyrighted.
That is wrong.
You don't need to say that stuff you produce is copyrighted by you - it
just *is* from the moment of creation. In fact, all these "copyrigh 2001
(c)" yaddayadda makes no real difference legally - except for making it
abundantly clear.

So the idea to make code anonymous by removing names doesn't hold at all
- it is still very much copyrighted by the author - it's just
troublesome that we don't know who it is and what licensing terms there
are for using it. Such code really should *not* be included into base
Squeak because then we really would be in trouble - we have no idea what
the terms are - it could even be stolen code from SCO Unix. ;)

In short - code without a known author is useless to us.

regards, Göran