Viral permissiveness

[Steve Thomas]

> [..] must all software distributed as source code, that involves contributions under different licenses, have either ...
>  1) an accompanying, 'definitive', revision history available for a licensee to inspect
> or
>  2) be distributed in original+patches form, with each patch potentially having a different license notice applying to it
> ... in order to be legally "sound", meaning that the licensee can know which licenses apply to code fragments?

Come to think of it, not even diffs are necessarily rich enough!
Under this interpretation of copyright law, isn't some "provenance"
data structure or markup associated with a source file required such
that, given a specific character of the file (highlighted by a cursor
in a text editor, say), it is possible to ascertain information
including:
  1) the license pertaining to the Work that character came from
  2) the owner of the copyright in that Work, if there is one

In simple and infrequently changing cases, this could perhaps be
maintained manually. Otherwise, text editors wou
ld be required that kept track of such metadata for their subject
files and for their buffers.

I note that 17 USC 201 states:"(c) Contributions to Collective Works.
-- Copyright in each separate contribution to a collective work is
distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole, and vests
initially in the author of the contribution. In the absence of an
express transfer of the copyright or of any rights under it, the owner
of copyright in the collective work is presumed to have acquired only
the privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution as part
of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective
work, and any later collective work in the same series."

Does "any revision of that collective work" include revision of the
contribution? If not, is it then the case that, by claiming a right to
modify subsists in the file as a whole, not just parts of it,
licensors are entertaining an extremely convenient fiction - but a
fiction nevertheless?

Answers anyone?

Steve

-- 
My GnuPG key ID is 0x82314996
Preferred keyserver: hkp://subkeys.pgp.net