You are not logged in.
Pages: 1
A few days ago I started hacking on a small open source project. Things have advanced to the point to where I'm considering a fork of the project that I intend to eventually make public.
The original project is under the MIT license, and I have some questions regarding keeping everything on the up and up.
The top of the file contains a copyright notice as well as the original authors name.
If I modify these files do I add my name to the list of authors?
Some files I've modified extensively, and in a few I've just changed a few lines. Should I treat those differently as far as listing authorship?
I'm in the process of creating some new files to put into the project that I intend to "sprinkle" with some of the previous authors source code. What's the standard way to give proper credit in this situation?
In one header file I noticed that the author forgot to put the copyright notice at the top, any suggestions on how to deal with this?
Any other tips dealing with these sort of issues would be appreciated.
Offline
You can keep the original files you fork from in case someone is curious how much of your work is original and how much is just copy-pasted.
I think listing contributors in the AUTHORS or CREDITS file should be enough.
Offline
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Since that is the only condition of the MIT license, it doesn't matter terribly much where you put the notice. Just make sure that, wherever you put it, you make it obvious exactly what portions of the code must remain under that license.
Are you planning to license your own portions of the code under the MIT license, or under another one?
"Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer." -- Alan J. Perlis
Offline
Are you planning to license your own portions of the code under the MIT license, or under another one?
I know MIT is GPL compatible, but I figured I'd just keep everything under the MIT license to make things easier.
Offline
austin.rbn wrote:Are you planning to license your own portions of the code under the MIT license, or under another one?
I know MIT is GPL compatible, but I figured I'd just keep everything under the MIT license to make things easier.
If the license stays the same, simply mention that "this software is a fork of XYZ by John Doe" or something like that.
Offline
Exactly. It's a lot easier if it's all under the MIT license. Then, you just need to include the old copyright name somewhere in the distribution of your altered version.
"Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer." -- Alan J. Perlis
Offline
Pages: 1