[gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications

[William Hubbs]

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