[Qt-creator] Copyright convention for plugins development

Mateusz Loskot mateusz at loskot.net
Sat Nov 23 01:01:19 CET 2013


Hi,

Following my question about licensing of plugins [1] which has been
clarified, I'd like to ask related one, about copyrights.

I have been working with codebase of Qt Creator for less than a month.
My impression is that process of new plugins development in many cases
is  based on following or copying how existing plugins are implemented.
The docs on plugins only explain basics helpful in first minutes of the journey.

During such process of following/copying, how copyrights should be managed?

For example,
AutotoolsProjectManager and GenericProjectManager, both have makestep.cpp
file where MakeStep::init() method is nearly identical, even comments
are the same, so obviously one of makestep.cpp version is copy of the other.

However, the copyright notices are disjoint:
- makestep.cpp from GenericProjectManager says:
** Copyright (C) 2013 Digia Plc and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
- makestep.cpp from AutotoolsProjectManager says:
** Copyright (C) 2013 Openismus GmbH.

Is that accepted practice for Qt Creator plugins?

I also do follow/copy while developing my own plugins.
So, assuming I stick to the same license, LGPL, I'd like to know:

What's the right way to deal with copyrights?

>From experience in other FOSS projects that I'm involved in,
if I followed/copied copyrighted code from file x.cpp while writing y.cpp,
I would have copied the original copyright notice from x.cpp to y.cpp,
and added my own copyright to that in y.cpp.

[1] http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/qt-creator/2013-November/002903.html

Best regards
-- 
Mateusz  Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net



More information about the Qt-creator mailing list