1 |
On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:32 AM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote: |
2 |
> |
3 |
> Since we do not do copyright assignment any more and the glep allows for |
4 |
> traditional attribution, if some entity |
5 |
> (company, person etc) has a desire for a copyright notice in |
6 |
> their work, the case for not allowing this is very weak at best, so we will |
7 |
> end up with more and more ebuilds that want to use traditional copyright |
8 |
> attribution, and once an ebuild is switched over, it is problematic to |
9 |
> switch back. |
10 |
|
11 |
So, the purpose of allowing specific copyright holders to be named was |
12 |
to cover cases where we're forking foreign code, not to basically |
13 |
introduce a variant on the BSD advertising clause. IMO people who are |
14 |
only willing to contribute FOSS if their name gets put in a prominent |
15 |
location might do better to contribute elsewhere. |
16 |
|
17 |
> |
18 |
> As you can see from my example, line length will quickly become |
19 |
> problematic in this format because all lines in in-tree ebuilds are |
20 |
> supposed to be under 80 characters. |
21 |
|
22 |
Indeed, this is tone of he problems with allowing people to spam the |
23 |
copyright notice. It is basically the advertising clause in a |
24 |
different place. |
25 |
|
26 |
> |
27 |
> It is also problematic because the relationship between the years and |
28 |
> contributors becomes unclear unless we allow ranges and single years in |
29 |
> the copyright notice, which would lead to something like this: |
30 |
> |
31 |
> # Copyright <years1>, <years2>, <years3>, ... <yearsn+1> [contributor1,] [contributor2,] [contributor3,] ... [contributorn] and others |
32 |
|
33 |
The purpose of a copyright notice is to declare that the file is |
34 |
copyrighted, and that is it. |
35 |
|
36 |
It isn't a comprehensive list of everybody who holds a copyright on the file. |
37 |
|
38 |
It isn't a revision history. |
39 |
|
40 |
There is no need to list various mixes of years and authors. Just |
41 |
list the first and last year, and whatever copyright holders are |
42 |
necessary. |
43 |
|
44 |
> Multiple-lines would be much easier to maintain, and |
45 |
> there is no cost performance wise for them. |
46 |
|
47 |
Except for spam in our files. |
48 |
|
49 |
Heck, repoman complains if you stick two newlines in a row in the |
50 |
file, and now we basically want to add a revision history to the file? |
51 |
|
52 |
Just say no. Fit it on one line. |
53 |
|
54 |
But, if you had to have multiple lines, then just wrap the existing |
55 |
notice. Don't turn it into some kind of revision history. Just list |
56 |
one year range and whatever list of entities you feel compelled to |
57 |
list. That is the proper way to do a notice. |
58 |
|
59 |
-- |
60 |
Rich |