How to mark a zlib licensed library as altered/edited by my name? [closed]

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开发者_运维百科 Improve this question

Hey so i've recently taken some pretty old source code from a GUI library, code that has been abandoned and forgotten, and did a massive amount of editing/fixing on it to the point where 50% of the code is now mine.

This library is licensed though, so if I wanted to put out there for others to use, how would i give myself credit for the 50% of code i wrote?

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IANAL.

This is going to be a partial answer.

According to the zlib license you have to mark altered versions as such:

2 . Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.

However, you may not alter the license notice:

3 . This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.

The question seems to reduce to whether or not the copyright line before the license is part of "This notice". This is a question I can't answer.

However, libpng developers have handled the issue gracefully and if you are lucky, the authors of the original software in question have followed the same route:

If you modify libpng you may insert additional notices immediately following this sentence.

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I'm not sure what you're asking here. You give yourself credit by giving yourself credit. Just say that portions of the code came from project X that was released under the zlib license. This is exactly what you would normally do if you hadn't modified the code at all.

All the zlib license says is that you can't pretend that you wrote the original, and that if you make alterations, you can't say that it is the original product.