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On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 06:17:17PM -0800, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:32 AM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote: |
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> > |
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> > Since we do not do copyright assignment any more and the glep allows for |
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> > traditional attribution, if some entity |
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> > (company, person etc) has a desire for a copyright notice in |
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> > their work, the case for not allowing this is very weak at best, so we will |
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> > end up with more and more ebuilds that want to use traditional copyright |
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> > attribution, and once an ebuild is switched over, it is problematic to |
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> > switch back. |
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> |
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> So, the purpose of allowing specific copyright holders to be named was |
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> to cover cases where we're forking foreign code, not to basically |
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> introduce a variant on the BSD advertising clause. IMO people who are |
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> only willing to contribute FOSS if their name gets put in a prominent |
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> location might do better to contribute elsewhere. |
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|
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Do you feel this way about corporations as well? Do you think the Linux |
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kernel maintainers should go and rip out all copyright notices other |
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than Linus Torvalds and maybe the Linux Foundation? |
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|
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> |
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> > |
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> > As you can see from my example, line length will quickly become |
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> > problematic in this format because all lines in in-tree ebuilds are |
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> > supposed to be under 80 characters. |
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> |
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> Indeed, this is tone of he problems with allowing people to spam the |
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> copyright notice. It is basically the advertising clause in a |
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> different place. |
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> |
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> > |
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> > It is also problematic because the relationship between the years and |
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> > contributors becomes unclear unless we allow ranges and single years in |
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> > the copyright notice, which would lead to something like this: |
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> > |
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> > # Copyright <years1>, <years2>, <years3>, ... <yearsn+1> [contributor1,] [contributor2,] [contributor3,] ... [contributorn] and others |
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> |
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> The purpose of a copyright notice is to declare that the file is |
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> copyrighted, and that is it. |
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> |
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> It isn't a comprehensive list of everybody who holds a copyright on the file. |
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> |
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> It isn't a revision history. |
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> |
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> There is no need to list various mixes of years and authors. Just |
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> list the first and last year, and whatever copyright holders are |
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> necessary. |
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> |
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> > Multiple-lines would be much easier to maintain, and |
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> > there is no cost performance wise for them. |
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> |
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> Except for spam in our files. |
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|
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And how does that affect performance? |
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|
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> Heck, repoman complains if you stick two newlines in a row in the |
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> file, and now we basically want to add a revision history to the file? |
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|
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No, a revision history comes from vcs. |
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|
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> |
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> Just say no. Fit it on one line. |
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> |
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> But, if you had to have multiple lines, then just wrap the existing |
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> notice. Don't turn it into some kind of revision history. Just list |
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> one year range and whatever list of entities you feel compelled to |
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> list. That is the proper way to do a notice. |
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|
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No sir, it isn't. |
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|
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Look anywhere outside the Gentoo tree. For that matter, take the Linux |
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kernel, or even in the systemd source, there are several places with |
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multiple copyright notices in them. |
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|
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William |