Re: CVS Commit by andreas: disable function owner

Dave Page wrote:
>
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Andreas Pflug [mailto:pgadmin(at)pse-consulting(dot)de]
>>Sent: 08 October 2004 12:14
>>To: Dave Page
>>Cc: pgadmin-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
>>Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] CVS Commit by andreas: disable
>>function owner for pgsql < 8.0 [Tony
>>
>>
>>Apparently I misunderstood that when I saw this in
>>CHANGELOG.txt (e.g.
>>on 2004-09-16).
>
>
> Ahh, yes well, Ivan wrote that patch, so was creditted for it. The
> changelog is a bit arbitrary though - some contributors get their
> initials in their once they've become regulars, regardless of whether
> they are committers or not. CVS is the 'one true record'.
>
>
>>I never got the idea of licensing issues on a
>>hint that an attribute was missing, but thought it would be a
>>good idea to reflect the appreciation of user's feedback
>>about pgadmin problems.
>
>
> Oh, certainly we should note ppl who report stuff. I just want it to be
> clear that they reported it rather than fixed it. For many years, I've
> used the [Author's name] convention in our CVS.

so [reporter] only in changelog, not cvs?

>
>
>>I don't object marking bug reporters in CHANGELOG.txt/cvs
>>differently, but this seems not adequate for licensing
>>issues. The nature of pgAdmin is quite clear, so anybody
>>posting something here already does this under the Artistic
>>Licence. For nontrivial extended code fragments contributed
>>by non-devteam members we should add a comment "contributed
>>by ..." in the sources.
>
>
> Again, that's fine with me. My concern is twofold- 1) what if the
> licence ever proves unusuable in court, we may then need to try to
> contact authors of previous code to relicence it, or 2) if there is ever
> a patent or IP claim against our codebase, we may need to be able to
> tell who did what.

It's not acceptable that even most trivial patches should lead to the
necessity to re-contact the issuer. This could simply paralyze us. In
this case, I'd opt to reject any posted patch until the author has
expressively granted everything to anybody forever. As soon as a bug is
reported, usually its fix is trivial (thus we don't need 3rd party
patches) or the posted patch isn't complete and needs rework because it
reveals more problems.

The idea of contacting people years later is not feasible either, as I
have to realize while trying to contact all our translators.

Certainly, one day in the future usage of the character sequence
wxTE_PASSWORD in a file ending with xrc might get patented. But that
would be the very moment I'd be burning my computers and start growing
sheep and potatoes. Lemon and sugar cane for distilling purposes might
be a good idea as well...

Regards,
Andreas