Re: [gentoo-dev] Are "Copyright 1999-20xx Gentoo Foundation" headers bogus?

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 7:00 AM, Mart Raudsepp <leio@g.o> wrote:
>
> Projects that want explicit copyright or copyright assignments or CLAs
> are those that want to be able to re-license the code without getting
> permissions from everyone (some of whom might not be possible to
> contact at a future date) or be able to sue someone for license
> violations without the original developers of the affected parts having
> to be involved. Are we pursuing those option, or why do we care?

These are useful options to have available.  The ability to pursue
violators would not require 100% signing of FLAs to work.  Relicensing
probably would, or close to it, so that might not ever be practical
unless FLA acceptance is very widespread.

> We don't need bogus or
> non-bogus copyright headers, just a "Gentoo project and contributors"
> copyright notice or optionally allowing explicit ones to those that
> want it, together with a license notice.

Actually, that isn't allowed, and was the very issue that kicked off
the entire matter.  You can't just take somebody else's code and
change the copyright to "Gentoo project and contributors" if the
Gentoo project's only contribution to the file is changing the
copyright notice.  From my reading on the topic you generally need to
list the largest contributor on the copyright line, which may or may
not be the Gentoo Foundation.

>
> And yes, the headers are currently completely bogus. You can consider
> it to be as such to any file I have contributed copyrightable work to,
> and the Gentoo Foundation does not have copyright to such work of mine.

If you don't think your contributions are copyrighted by the Gentoo
Foundation, you probably shouldn't be putting that statement in the
files you commit.  I don't see why your commits are any less legally
binding on you than your statements in emails like the one above.

And this is why improving the policy in this space is important.

-- 
Rich