Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Kent Fredric <kentnl@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] GLEP 76: Copyright Policy
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2018 02:15:08
Message-Id: 20180617141436.2745dcaa@katipo2.lan
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] GLEP 76: Copyright Policy by Rich Freeman
1 On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 21:39:49 -0400
2 Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
3
4 > On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 9:03 PM Kent Fredric <kentnl@g.o> wrote:
5 >
6 > There really isn't any negative consequence to the person listed on a
7 > copyright notice being "wrong" as far as I can tell. I use quotes
8 > because as long as the person listed contributed SOMETHING to the file
9 > the statement is still accurate, even if non-ideal. I doubt a court
10 > is going to decide a case differently because the person listed on the
11 > copyright notice wrote 20% of a file vs somebody else who wrote 40%.
12 > As far as I'm aware the name listed on a copyright notice isn't
13 > binding at all on a court - the court is free to determine who
14 > actually owns the copyright based on the facts of the situation. The
15 > notice simply serves to inform the recipient of a work that it IS
16 > copyrighted, so that they can't claim innocent infringement. The work
17 > remains copyrighted all the same if the notice is not present, and
18 > future infringement after receiving notice would not be innocent
19 > regardless.
20
21 Surely then, the most effective and usefully correct copyright notice
22 (for portage trees at least), would be:
23
24 "Copyright Gentoo Foundation and Contributors"
25
26 Or similar, instead of abandoning the Gentoo Foundation Copyright and using
27 a random persons name?
28
29 Otherwise most of the proposal in regards to portage trees, is mostly a
30 waste of time.
31
32 > (So the "Copyright Gentoo Foundation" lines will be
33 > phased out.)
34
35 Because otherwise, the objective of putting a humans name there is
36 misleading at best, and serves no objective purpose.
37
38 If the objective is to simply denote the file has a copyright, that
39 format should do the job.
40
41 ( Additionally, I have no opposition to generating a package-wide
42 file that notates contributors, such an approach is routinely
43 satisfactory for debian with regards to marking up which files have
44 which licenses without needing to inject the license in the file, and
45 has the benefit of exposing that metadata to consumers who only access
46 via rsync or tarballs, its just in-band in-git data that I find most
47 obnoxious due to being functionally redundant )

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] GLEP 76: Copyright Policy Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>