Would an open source project have "Copyright. All rights reserved." written on its licensing disclaimer?

Question

I was trying to make some code I wrote be published under LGPL. I included the appropriate header in each file, but StyleCop told me to include a copyright notice also. But I think that "Copyright. All rights reserved." is not intended to free software. Should I remove it?

Answer 1

Of course it would. All products are owned by someone - OSS stuff just happens to make source available as well as allowing free use amongst other things.

Answer 2

It's why it's called an open source license. Someone still owns the copyright, and that owner is licensing the source code for use under the terms of the license, granting certain limited rights. This is my understanding of the situation anyway.

edit: To be clear to the downvoters, the original author is not releasing his source code into the public domain, he's using the LGPL, there's a huge difference. If he were releasing into the public domain, he would be revoking his copyrights. In a COPYLEFT license, the owner retains copyright, and releases it under a very liberal license that requires all future users to release the source code to publically available modifications. This is a clever subversion of the law, but it means the owner must retain ownership for it to work. Otherwise there's nobody who can sue any violators.

edit: "I'm not a down-voter, but your answer would be more useful if you could explain the need for "All rights reserved.""

read as "All rights reserved, except those expressly granted under the license below, and under the conditions stipulated in the license below" or alternatively "This is not being released into the public domain". Either of those is easier to understand for a layperson, but it's not stated like that, because it would lead to a legal "bug". "All rights reserved" doesn't mean that you're denying other people rights, just that you're not waiving your own rights.

edit one more note: Strictly speaking "Copyright (author), all rights reserved" is not needed, because it's implied, by default, within the act of any authorship within the united states. But as the programmer saying goes: Explicit is better than Implicit. Especially considering that quite a lot of people don't know that fact, and it makes it easier to find the original author down the road, if there's a "signature" of some kind.

Edit: Oh by the way, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Answer 3

Jeff Atwood once wrote an interesting blog post about licensing, its worth a read it would put a lot of what has been discussed here in context.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000833.html

Answer 4

You retain your copyright on your work, but you are licensing it with specific rights, so I am not sure the all rights reserved part is correct. The guidelines for licensing with FSF licences is here

Answer 5

i completely agree with the majority of others because even open source software has to be owned by a person, group of people or company otherwise no one would have created it in the first place. The creator(s) have their intellectual rights and even though they release it as open source, the LGPL, GPL etc licenses are saying, "i made this, i have the rights to it but i am extending those rights to you if you wish to modify the source code" as for the all rights reserved bit, bascially if person a created it and person b modified a part of the code to improve it or whatever, both person a and person b have their rights on the code that they made.

Answer 6

LGPL and GPL (and for that matter just about any opensource license) works very closely in concert with the Copyright laws. You should read the GPL/LGPS licenses. Someone will always own the copyright, unless it's released to the Public Domain, so licenses have to acknowledge and care(greatly infact) about copyrights.

Answer 7

LGPL is a copyright license. "All rights reserved" is a copyright license (edit: and an obsolete one, according to Wikipedia's article on it). If you reserve "all rights," then you are, by definition, not using the LGPL.

So the answer to your question is this: StyleCop is wrong. You should not include "All rights reserved."

StyleCopy is more than wrong, it is out of its silicon mind. Why should you reserve all rights if you want to use LGPL?

By the way, two things you may wish to consider:

1. You should read the LGPL web page at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html. Specifically, FSF doesn't want you to use LGPL --- they want you to use GPL.
2. To avoid a lot of copyright problems, FSF asks that people transfer copyright to FSF for GNU projects. Most people don't do this, and that creates a copyright nightmare when trying to compose large software projects that have a zillion different copyright statements in them.

I strongly recommend that you do not follow StyleCop.

Answer 8

Even though you Open Source license your code, it will still be the copyright of someone. The only alternative is if you submit it to the Public Domain - which I only know about one prestige project that have ever done - Anthem.NET.

Now the reasons are often first of all that you may want to add a disclaimer, and if you want to add a disclaimer like for instance "I am not responsible for bugs" and such, then unless you hold the copyright and have others use it due to a license instead of just "Public Domain" then such a disclaimer carries no weight.

Another reason is that you may want to force people to kick back contributions in the forms of LGPL or GPL, which also is impossible unless people are using it according to a "license".

So yes, it is highly usual to add a "copyright(c) John Doe" in your code files, even though the project is Open Source. And in fact the concept of copyleft which FSF talks highly about is in fact impossible without someone actually having the copyright for the code...