Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications

[Andrew Savchenko]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2018 07:50:48 -0800 Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 6:46 PM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 06:17:17PM -0800, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:32 AM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Since we do not do copyright assignment any more and the glep allows for
> > > > traditional attribution, if some entity
> > > > (company, person etc) has a desire for a copyright notice in
> > > > their work, the case for not allowing this is very weak at best, so we will
> > > > end up with more and more ebuilds that want to use traditional copyright
> > > > attribution, and once an ebuild is switched over, it is problematic to
> > > > switch back.
> > >
> > > So, the purpose of allowing specific copyright holders to be named was
> > > to cover cases where we're forking foreign code, not to basically
> > > introduce a variant on the BSD advertising clause.  IMO people who are
> > > only willing to contribute FOSS if their name gets put in a prominent
> > > location might do better to contribute elsewhere.
> >
> > Do you feel this way about corporations as well? Do you think the Linux
> > kernel maintainers should go and rip out all copyright notices other
> > than Linus Torvalds and maybe the Linux Foundation?
>
> Give me an example of a Linux kernel source file that contains a
> multiline table of years and copyright holders.  At best you'll find
> random notices scattered around files in my experience, mostly because
> of how the code was pulled in from outside.

Sure, from line 4 to line 10:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/char/random.c

Multiline table with copyright holders and separate years for each
one.

> > Look anywhere outside the Gentoo tree. For that matter, take the Linux
> > kernel, or even in the systemd source, there are several places with
> > multiple copyright notices in them.
>
> Find me any project that organizes these into tables with years and
> copyright holders at the top of the file consistently as a matter of
> policy.  As far as I can tell the Linux project has no consistent
> policy on this front, and systemd inherited numerous outside source
> trees as its scope expanded.

We are not talking about demanding multiline headers for each
ebuild, we are talking about a policy allowing such headers if
necessary. This is the essentially same as Linux kernel does.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko