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

[Rich Freeman]

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.

> >
> > > Multiple-lines would be much easier to maintain, and
> > > there is no cost performance wise for them.
> >
> > Except for spam in our files.
>
> And how does that affect performance?

I never claimed it did.  It is visual clutter.  Eyeballs willing to
maintain our ebuilds are far more scarce than CPU cycles.

And if we don't care about visual clutter, then why do we have repoman
warn about extraneous whitespace (as we should)?

>
> 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.

-- 
Rich