Martin Dougiamas

And if anyone knows of a suitable international standard for classifying curriculum please let let us know.

Perhaps the "fields of education" list here:

http://www.unesco.org/education/information/nfsunesco/doc/isced_1997.htm

Hi all,

Sam Hemelryk (our new developer) has been given the exciting (!) task of cleaning up some of the core Moodle files and making sure we have consistent boilerplate notices and phpdoc tags, as described here:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Coding_style#Files

We've been running into a lot of files with labels that are wrong or so on.

ISSUE 1: copyright owners

My general policy with Moodle is to encourage all developers to put their own copyright notice on the files they create (even if I was paying them to do the work!) because I believe spreading the copyright over many people makes Moodle a stronger GPL project and virtually removes the chance that anyone can change the license to something else in the future.

Frankly I don't care whose name is on individual files as long as it's GPL and we can all use it!

Some people have said they'd like to see copyright explicitly given to every contributor in a file. This can sound like a good idea at first, however, since most Moodle files will have dozens of contributors this is absolutely impractical to maintain and will almost always give wrong/misleading results. If we did start this practice then we'd have a whole lot of people adding their names to every file every time they even changed one line. This is all very confusing for people to know who to contact about any given file if they have to.

So instead what we are currently doing is implementing (where possible) the policy of: "the original author for the file sets the copyright and GPL license, all subsequent authors are just contributors". You can easily see all the contributors for a given file by looking in the CVS records.

So when fixing files:

1. For Moodle code where there are currently no copyright notices or just my name (Martin D), fix by adding one copyright notice in the name of the ORIGINAL AUTHOR of the file (as determined from talking to developers or original commit records).
2. For Moodle code where a Moodle core developer has mistakenly added several names, reduce the copyright notice to the real original author (checking this with all the people involved).
3. For code that already has clear copyrights in it (especially 3rd party libraries), retain the names exactly as originally stated, even if there are multiple copyright holders.

Comments on all this are welcome, and if you notice any mistakes being made please file bugs in the tracker under the "Licensing" component.


ISSUE 2: GPL versions

We are moving Moodle completely to "GPL v3 or later" instead of "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v2". There are lots of benefits to this, outlined here:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html

There are a number of small issues of compatibility which we are sorting out while going through the files (it's practically always just accidental bad labelling by developers). Again, if you see any issues, please file bugs in the tracker under the new "Licensing" component.


ISSUE 3: $Id$ tags

As determined by the recent vote, Sam is removing all the $Id$ tags where he finds them to make life easier for Git users.

I agree that would be nice but I really can't see how that could work as part of our events API (which has been in Moodle since 1.9, by the way)... perhaps this is an entirely different API.

Could you expand on how you think that would work?

What if the event then doesn't happen due to an error?

OK, I updated http://docs.moodle.org/en/Standard_Moodle_tags#Tags_in_use to include the letter after the year.