[Qt-creator] Copyright convention for plugins development

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 12:01:19AM +0000, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> During such process of following/copying, how copyrights should be managed?
> 
what you are calling "copyrights" (i.e., the copyright headers) are
legally largely irrelevant. it's merely a claim of copyright. the actual
copyright derives from the code's origin, which can be tracked in the
git history, and would have to be testified about in court. therefore,
these headers are more about giving credit than copyright.

> 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.
> 
this is entirely correct.
note that the digia copyright can be added indiscriminately, because the
CLA grants it to digia.
when you are copying code selectively, you would need to check which
external contributors had a part in the copied fragments. this is
tedious even if you just use git log/blame, and strictly speaking it
isn't even sufficient (new code written by one party can still logically
derive from another party's work, even in a different file). given the
effort involved and the fact that in the end you always end up with an
inconsistent mess anyway, there is a certain reluctance to add
additional headers for anything that is not "obviously significant".

disclaimer: IANAL, this is not digia's official position, blah blah
blah ...