[Botan-devel] Changing license to directly reflect contributors

[Jack Lloyd]

This is basically administrivia and really doesn't affect anyone, but
I thought it best to announce beforehand that there will be a small
change in how Botan is licensed in future releases.

Currently Botan's license and source code says it is copyrighted by
'The Botan Project'. The idea I had when I did this was to set up some
sort of non profit foundation that would own the code license and so
on. However I really don't have the time, nor does it really seem that
important for a project this small. Since this organization doesn't
really exist, and because none of the people who contributed code ever
(legally) assigned copyright, the license was a bit of a fraud, though
a benign one. The idea here is to correct this and have the license
directly identify the actual copyright holders.

The first part of the license will be changed to read:

Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Jack Lloyd
              2001 Peter J Jones
              2004-2007 Justin Karneges
              2005 Matthew Gregan
              2005-2006 Matt Johnston
              2006 Luca Piccarreta
              2007 Yves Jerschow

Which reflects, as best as I've been able to reconstruct from email
and commit logs, who provided substantial patches that were committed
to the tree.

The copyright notices in files will be changed to reflect who made
changes and when.

I expect this will happen on net.randombit.botan before the next
release. I'm aiming for 1.7.5 this weekend, as I believe a couple of
people working on Monotone are waiting on the next release.

-Jack