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

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 1:49 PM Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
>
> >>>>> On Thu, 11 Oct 2018, Brian Dolbec wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> As I've already commented in the pull request [1], I think this isn't
> something that should be automated in a QA tool like repoman.
>
> IMHO, repoman should accept both forms of the copyright notice, as long
> as they're syntactically well-formed. Otherwise, it should leave the
> copyright holder alone (with the possible exception of updating Gentoo
> Foundation to Gentoo Authors).
>
> > This option should only ever be used for significant changes to an
> > ebuild.
>
> Right, but I think there is the danger that the feature will be abused,
> e.g. that people will use it also for non-copyrightable changes.
>

Also, unless we want some kind of endlessly-concatenating copyright
notice, I don't think we want repoman just changing the line.

Suppose I change an existing ebuild, and for the sake of argument
let's assume that my changes are sufficient to be "copyrightable."
Existing ebuild says "Copyright Gentoo Authors" / etc.  I want it to
say "Copyright Rich Freeman and Others" / etc.  Whether adding an
extra 10% to an ebuild really warrants that change is debatable, but
let's let that slide.  Now suppose ulm comes along with similar
demands, does he just wipe out my name and substitute his own?  Or
does this turn into the BSD advertising clause where we start
accumulating names?

The GLEP has been through many iterations, but the intent was always
to avoid turning the copyright notice into some kind of authors list
because it fails pretty badly at that.  It gets unwieldy very quickly,
and if everybody wants to stamp their names all over everything
presumably they're going to cry foul if somebody else wants to stamp
their name over top.

We already ran into a bit of a PR issue when somebody overwrote the
udev authors with the Gentoo Foundation when forking eudev.  There was
no ill intent - they were just trying to comply with a policy.  But,
suppose I make a 20% change to a file - am I going to upset some
outsider whose code I borrowed by "stripping" their copyright notices.
I believe when I looked up the laws regarding this it is actually only
a crime to do so when it is used to conceal infringement, which isn't
happening if we're sticking to the FOSS license, but people get really
sensitive about these things.

The intent around being flexible with copyright notices is so that we
can do things like forking eudev, because the policy basically will
accept the previous copyright notices if they are sane.  However, the
intent isn't for people to be having wars over whether they're getting
"credit."  You already have credit in git.  Outsiders should also be
getting credit in git (you can ack them in the commit, just as the
kernel does).  And major contributors have sometimes been known to ask
the Foudation to write a note to affirm their contributions for job
applications and such.  There are better ways to give people credit
than copyright notices, which also serve a legal purpose (which is far
simpler).

So, having repoman stamp names all over things seems like a bad idea,
because we have to deal with what happens when multiple people start
stamping over each other's stuff.  If a company cares THAT much about
having their name in the notice, then will they care when their
competitor who also has the same policy stamps their name over top?
How can repoman handle that sanely short of concatenating, presumably
avoiding duplication in a text field with poor structure/etc...

-- 
Rich