Re: Changing Message Text "(C) Copyright IBM Corp. 1980, 1998."

Jon.Paris@halinfo.it wrote:

>Isn't it an essential point of a Copyright notice that you can't change
>it? Seems to me IBM would be daft to make that possible.

Absolutely.

A software house I once worked for wrote a bespoke system for the Geneva
office of a major U.S. bank. One of the requirements was that it use
commitment control throughout. Shortly after we delivered it they
complained that there were serious bugs, so we flew out one of our top
programmers to fix it free of charge under the terms of our guarantee.

Problem 1: they'd decided they didn't want commitment control after all so
they'd got their contract programmer Able Baker hack it out. Unfortunately
he hadn't realised that this might affect the logic of some of the
programs.

Problem 2: The copyright notice in every program had somehow changed itself
from

          (C) Copyright Acme Systems Ltd. 1988
to
          (C) Copyright Able Baker. 1988

We weren't terribly happy.

Dave Kahn, ABB Steward Ltd.

P.S. The above incident is true, but the names aren't.


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