[Sugar-devel] Copyright notices

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Mon, 2011-01-03 at 11:28 +1100, James Cameron wrote:
> The GPL has a section on how to apply the license to a program, and it
> describes placing a summary of the license in the source.

I'll ask the FSF licensing lawyer if there's an actual legal reason to
do so or if it's just excess safety.


> It also suggests making the license visible to the user when the program
> starts, which I've seen done as stderr, stdout, a GUI splash, or Help -
> About menu item.  I've not seen Sugar activities do this.

An About menu item would be a nice addition. To avoid clutter, we could
put it in the popup menu of the stop button.

It would be nice if the About function could have a default
implementation which displays some metadata from activity.info: name,
version, author and license.

I'm not too keen on displaying the full text of the GPL, though. I don't
care if it's common practice. Saying "GPLv2+" or "GPLv3+" with a web
link to the complete license should be a reasonable compromise between
UI clutter and pleasing lawyers.

Anyway, if there's some consensus on the basic idea of an About function
for activities, I could work on a patch in my spare time.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/