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>>>>> On Sun, 30 Sep 2018, Sergei Trofimovich wrote: |
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> Hello all! |
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> 14 October (in 2 weeks from now) |
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> at 19:00 UTC Council will meet again. |
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> Please provide agenda items you would like council@ to |
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> look at (and act) as a reply to this email. |
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The new copyright policy (GLEP 76) leaves it to projects to decide |
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whether they use the long form or the simplified form of the copyright |
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attribution. I would like to ask the council to decide that the |
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simplified attribution [1] shall be used for ebuilds in the Gentoo |
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repository. |
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Rationale: |
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- Policy of the Gentoo repository is a global issue that should be |
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decided by the council. |
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- Quoting the GLEP: "Especially for ebuild repositories, constantly |
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keeping track of the main copyright holder of any file would be rather |
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inconvenient and tedious." This is particularly true for ebuilds in the |
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Gentoo repository, where tracing the main contributor of all ebuilds |
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would be a major effort. A developer who is updating an ebuild shouldn't |
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have to do a copyright audit, in order to find out if the notice is |
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still accurate or needs to be updated. Using the simplified attribution |
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avoids that. |
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- Changing an existing copyright notice (e.g., from "Dev. E. Loper and |
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others" to "Gentoo Authors") could be problematic from a legal point |
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of view, so using the simplified form from the very beginning may be |
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preferable. |
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- Our previous policy to require "Gentoo Foundation" in the copyright |
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notice doesn't seem to have caused any significant problems with |
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contributors. So I would expect "Gentoo Authors" to work as well. |
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If necessary, organisations that hold copyright to parts of the tree |
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could be traced in an AUTHORS file. (That would resemble the scheme |
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used by the Chromium project [2].) |
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|
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Ulrich |
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[1] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html#simplified-attribution |
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[2] https://www.chromium.org/developers/contributing-code#TOC-Legal-stuff |