Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 6:36 AM Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> wrote:
>
> What's the main problem of most FOSS including Gentoo? Lack of
> human power. And here you propose to neglect contributions if they
> want a proper and legal and allowed by GPL attribution.

Where is anybody talking about "attribution?"

This is about copyright notice, which is NOT about crediting anybody
with anything or giving attribution.  It is about communicating the
fact that code is copyrighted, so that people can't claim that they
didn't know when the Foundation wants to sue them.  I'm sure they're
about to start doing that anytime...

Also, this doesn't seem to have been a problem in the past, and yet
our policy was far less free then.

> A few extra lines in the header doesn't as much as
> inability to import GPL ebuilds to the tree due to our
> questionable copyright line policy.

What is it that we want to import but can't today?

>
> > But, if you had to have multiple lines, then just wrap the existing
> > notice.  Don't turn it into some kind of revision history.
>
> That's what most FOSS software does. I see no reason why we should
> be different.

Do you have a citation for this?  I'm not aware of many FOSS projects
that use copyright notices as a revision history, let alone "most."

> IMO the best solution will be to recommend "Gentoo Authors"
> attribution, but to allow additional copyright lines including the
> case where "Gentoo Authors" is one of such lines.

IMO doing this will just cause everybody and their uncle to insist on
putting their names in various places.

We've done just fine for going on 20 years not allowing any notice
other than "Copyright xxx Gentoo Foundation."  Now we open things up a
tiny bit and suddenly everybody and their uncle is saying that their
employers won't let them contribute code unless they stick their
company name in there.  What have they been doing for the last decade?

-- 
Rich