Item251: Add tag in SVN to identify specific version of TWiki that has been licensed

In order to clearly identify which version of the released TWiki software has been licensed, can a tag be added in Subversion to label the imported version? This will make it easier to refer to the specific license and copyright statements that were in effect for this snapshot.

-- IsaacLin

We are a few that do not understand what you mean. Can you clarify for us?

TWiki and Foswiki are both GPL. Always were. Always will be.

• KennethLavrsen - 30 Nov 2008

In accordance with the GPL, the Foswiki project must preserve the copyright statements of the snapshot of the TWiki project it is deriving from, and have a license compatible with the TWiki license. To make it easier to refer to the specific copyright statements, author lists, and license in effect at the moment of the fork, it would be helpful to have a tag labeling the imported version. For example, CopyrightAndLicense refers to the TWiki copyright statement and license that the Foswiki project must respect. As a placeholder, it currently refers to the version in the Release branch, but it would be better for it to point to a specific tagged version, identifying the imported snapshot. The copyright and license statements for each plugin also need to be preserved to ensure compliance. Another alternative is to refer to the TWiki Subversion repository, but since this is out of the Foswiki project's control, I believe it is preferable to keep track of all of the appropriate intellectual property information within the Foswiki repository.

-- IsaacLin - 01 Dec 2008

OK. I understand now. We could do this naturally.

But I am not sure how clear a snap we have because we checked in the many plugins step by step while in parallel modifying the core.

An easier approach may be to simply look at the TWiki SVN co when you have doubt. There are tags there of 4.2.2 at least.

Maybe Sven has a way to easily do it.

It is true that we must maintain copyright statements and we had a few issues in the beginning. But lately I have noticed that people are adding copyrights the correct way. Probably because in the beginning we were mainly addressing core and default plugins. And now it is more plugins in general where the copyrights are individual people's. That is easier to cope with as they have not recently been altered to be twiki.net Google food.

-- KennethLavrsen - 03 Dec 2008

AFAIK there has been no "parallel modifying of the core". We forked on 29th Oct. We took a snapshot of the repository that day - or certainly before any significant checkins were made. Therefore that version in TWiki subversion is the licensed version. According to my checkin monitor, that's rev 17710 of the TWiki subversion repository (the last checkin I ever made). We don't need a TWiki version (like '4.2.3'). Keep it simple; I would suggest using a statement like this in the release notes:

"This release of Foswiki is developed from revision 17710 of the TWiki Subversion repository."

Since it is very hard to rewrite a subversion history, that should be sufficient.

Done.

• CrawfordCurrie - 03 Dec 2008

Not so much worried about rewriting history, but if say TWiki.NET decides to move away from Subversion to something else, and decommissions the Subversion server, it would be nice to have a clearly identified version in the Foswiki repository that is tagged as TWiki_revision_17710. -- IsaacLin - 03 Dec 2008

A good point, thanks Isaac. I looked at subversion and that point is revision 14 of our repository. I will update the topic accordingly.

• CrawfordCurrie - 04 Dec 2008