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

[M. J. Everitt]

On 13/11/18 18:32, William Hubbs wrote:
> All,
>
> I need to ask the community a couple of questions about copyright
> attribution that came up this past couple of weeks around bug 670702 [1].
>
> My first question is about the "Gentoo Authors" string. My understanding
> of this is that this string is to be only used in the simplified
> form of attribution and is not a generic catch-all that can be used in
> the traditional form. Does everyone agree with this? If so, this is
> somewhat problematic for traditional attribution, but I'll talk about
> that below.
>
> 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.
>
> Some in the council seem to want a tree policy that requires
> traditional attribution to be one and only one line at the top of ebuilds,  e.g.
>
> # Copyright <years> [contributor1,] [contributor2,] [contributor3,] ...  [contributorn] and others
>
> As you can see from my example, line length will quickly become
> problematic in this format because all lines in in-tree ebuilds are
> supposed to be under 80 characters.
>
> It is also problematic because the relationship between the years and
> contributors becomes unclear unless we allow ranges and single years in
> the copyright notice, which would lead to something like this:
>
> # Copyright <years1>, <years2>, <years3>, ... <yearsn+1>  [contributor1,] [contributor2,] [contributor3,] ...  [contributorn] and others
>
> This is going to have the same maintenance issues as traditional multiline
> attribution, but it is going to be very painful to maintain since it is
> all on one line. Multiple-lines would be much easier to maintain, and
> there is no cost performance wise for them.
>
> # Copyright <years1> <contributor1>
> # Copyright <years2> <contributor2>
> # Copyright <years3> <contributor3>
> # ...
> # Copyright <yearsn+1> others (or some catch-all like it)
>
> This seems to be a pretty compelling case for multiline traditional
> attribution. What do folks think?
>
> William
>
> [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/670702
> [2] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html
Surely that's a no-brainer? (to make copyrights multi-line, like every
other source out there in the wild already ...

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