Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2018-10-14

[Brian Dolbec]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 15:31:39 +0300
Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:43:52 +0200 Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> > >>>>> On Sun, 30 Sep 2018, Sergei Trofimovich wrote:
> >
> > > Hello all!
> > > 14 October (in 2 weeks from now)
> > > at 19:00 UTC Council will meet again.
> >
> > > Please provide agenda items you would like council@ to
> > > look at (and act) as a reply to this email.
> >
> > The new copyright policy (GLEP 76) leaves it to projects to decide
> > whether they use the long form or the simplified form of the
> > copyright attribution. I would like to ask the council to decide
> > that the simplified attribution [1] shall be used for ebuilds in
> > the Gentoo repository.
>
> I'd like to voice strongly against this motion.
>
> Rationale:
>
> - We have out of the Gentoo repository ebuilds which may be
> incorporated in the main repository and are licensed properly but
> an author requires his copyright in the first line to be preserved.
> GPL-2 allows us to use such ebuilds, but our past copyright policy
> mandating "Gentoo Foundation" doesn't, as well as proposed motion
> which mandates "Gentoo Authors" instead of the list of authors
> including main author if they require so.
>
> - GLEP 76 already did significant harm to our community by
> outlawing current anonymous or pseudonymous contributions. Moreover
> we have people who want to join community, but keep their identity
> hidden. This is understandable, especially for security or privacy
> oriented software. The harm should go no further. We have a lot of
> talks how we need more developers, but what we are doing in many
> steps including GLEP 76 is exactly the opposite: we are creating
> additional barriers due to vague and bureaucratic reasons.
>
> Of course if authors wants to use "Gentoo Authors" this should be
> allowed, especially for automatic migration from the "Gentoo
> Foundation" line. But we must preserve the right to use explicit
> list of authors (including "and others" if necessary) if a
> maintainer wants so.
>
> Best regards,
> Andrew Savchenko

+1

My employer sponsors a lot of Gentoo ebuild and project work.  We are
currently waiting for approval from the legal department to be able to
continue after the Glep 76 approval and subsequent enforcement.  It
very well may include a requirement to include a company copyright
notice for the work done on comapny time and equipment.

I have prepared a patch to repoman which fully implements Glep 76. [1]
It adds a COPYRIGHT_OWNER variable to make.conf which can be set.
The COPYRIGHT_OWNER is only ever ensured (possibly added) to the
existing copyright line if the --copyright option is given on the cli.
It is also used to generate a new copyright line if one did not exist.

This option should only ever be used for significant changes to an
ebuild.  I could extend it to include a --others option to append the
"and others" to the copyright.  But I don't know if that will be used
enough to justify the extra code.

This patch also makes repoman more friendly for downstream repositiries
which could set the copyright apropriately without manual editing.


[1] https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/376