[Nagiosplug-devel] Antwort: Antwort: Contributing patches and retaining copyright

[Philip Brown]

Olivier 'Babar' Raginel wrote:

> Let's take a concrete example: Nagios::Plugins. Afaik, Gavin Carr wrote 
> the first shot at this. It's been extended a lot since then. What if, 
> over time, someone refactors that up to a point that not a single line 
> of what Gavin wrote is left in the source. If I did that re-factoring, 
> would I then be able to claim copyright? Would the copyright be shared 
> between Gavin, myself, and the others who made substantial contributions 
> to that piece of code?
> May I also rip Gavin's name out of N::P then?
> 

it then becomes an issue of both copyright, AND trademark. (the name).
if you have essentially a new work, then he no longer would  have any claim 
to copyright. but may still retain some rights to the name. except that it's 
got "nagios" in the name, so the nagios trademark holders would probably 
hold trump card on that one.

however, for me too, IANAL.