[MPlayer-dev-eng] [RFC] Makefile copyrights

[Diego Biurrun]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 08:33:38PM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 07:45:40PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 11:20:22PM +0300, Ivan Kalvachev wrote:
> > > On 5/28/08, Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de> wrote:
> > > > I'd like to commit the attached patch and mark the Makefile as
> > > > copyrighted by me.  Not a single (non-empty) line written by Arpi
> > > > or LGB remains in it, nor does any of the original structure.
> > > >
> > > > Nonetheless I can see a world of hurt coming down the pipe if I
> > > > commit this directly, thus the RFC.
> > > 
> > > I think we had precedent like this.
> > > I'm not sure if it was here or FFmpeg
> > > (or maybe some other project) ...
> > 
> > We have the same situation in FFmpeg where Mans and I rewrote all the
> > Makefiles completely, dunno if you are referring to that.
> > 
> > > The polite procedure is to ask people
> > > who hold the copyright to confirm there is no their code left
> > > and they don't have any claims.
> > 
> > The situation is slightly different here since the Makefile is not
> > marked as copyrighted.  The text it contains is more like a short
> > changelog.
> > 
> > Thus I'm tempted to commit as-is, without prior consultation, as I don't
> > think they have any say in the matter.  Being polite is not the top
> > priority here, being right is.
> 
> ... because we have too many developers, the risk pissing a few old ones
> off is not an issues. We dont want them to come back anyway

I realize that the paragraph I wrote above comes across much harsher
than intended.

Let's review what we are talking about here:

# LINUX Makefile made by A'rpi / Astral
# Some cleanup by LGB: 	* 'make -C dir' instead of 'cd dir;make;cd..'
#			* for loops instead of linear sequence of make directories
#			* some minor problems with make clean and distclean were corrected
#			* DVD support

This is not a copyright statement, it is a changelog.

Or let's look at it in even more detail: It is two parts

1) claim of authorship by Arpi
2) changelog by LGB

Now the changelog is completely pointless.  There have been hundreds of
changes since this and none of what is mentioned there is still part of
the Makefile.  We have Subversion history where all the changes and
credits are properly recorded.  Changelogs should not be placed
(duplicated rather) in files.

The claim of authorship also no longer applies.  I rewrote the Makefile
entirely and the complete structure is also different.

But it is clearly not my intention to piss anyone off.  I will write
something like

# MPlayer Makefile
# copyright (c) 2008 Diego Biurrun
# rewritten entirely from a set of Makefiles by Arpi et al

That will hopefully be acceptable for everybody.

> It takes time, alot of time to understand some of the code in
> mplayer, the project needs people who understand the code not people
> who rewrite code with even more bugs because they didnt understand
> the existing code.

Fortunately, this is not the case for the build system.  I can claim
with a great deal of confidence that the Makefile(s) never had as few
bugs as now :)

Diego