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Let me first describe the problem. Currently the GLEP states: |
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# Purpose / Scope |
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"This policy documents how Gentoo contributors comply and document |
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copyright for any contributions made to Gentoo. Anyone committing |
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documentation or sources to any repository hosted on Gentoo |
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infrastructure or to any official Gentoo project (independently of |
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hosting) must comply with this policy." |
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|
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# Certificate of Origin |
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"All commits to Gentoo project repositories shall be accompanied by a |
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certificate of origin." |
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"For commits made using a VCS, the committer shall certify agreement" |
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"The sign-off must contain the committer's legal name as a natural person" |
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"By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:" |
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- "The contribution was created in whole or in part by me" |
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- "The contribution was provided directly to me by some other person |
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who certified 1., 2., 3., or 4., and I have not modified it." |
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"I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are |
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public and that a record of the contribution (including all personal |
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information I submit with it, including my sign-off)" |
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---------- |
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|
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This causes few misunderstandings with the requirements. Is the legal |
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name sign-off required from the *committer*, or from the *contributor*? |
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What about a contribution where the author just adds a patch from |
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upstream, how much is covered by the Gentoo copyright policies? |
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|
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We've turned down many contributions in the past because the contributor |
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did not wish to share their real name. Too many. We've also merged |
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contributions from Github accounts with no history, and absolutely no |
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way for us to determine whether the affiliated name is real. Heck, you |
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can't even tell if the name I use is real. ;) |
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|
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Lately we've seen some devs interpret this GLEP as they wish to get |
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contributions in. And we've seen devs silently ignoring the policy. And |
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we've seen devs just taking out the original author from the contributed |
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.patch, pushing someone else's work under their name. None of these |
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actions accomplish what the GLEP was made for. |
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Therefore I suggest we update the GLEP to *clearly* state that *only* |
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committer's sign-off is required. (And I feel like even that is |
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debatable, but at least a start for now) |
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|
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|
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Then a small note about ebuild's copyright header. The GLEP states: |
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"All copyrightable files included in Gentoo projects must contain |
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appropriate copyright and license notices" |
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|
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but do ebuilds, at least most of the ebuilds, contain copyrightable |
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innovative work? Most ebuilds are just following the basic skeleton form |
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and calling functions from eclasses and EAPI. Therefore I suggest the |
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copyright headers in ebuilds shouldn't be mandatory, but opt-in, if the |
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author feels like it contains innovative work. |
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And why couldn't we use the ./header.txt to indicate this copyright for |
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every ebuild, why must it be replicated to each .ebuild file? We also |
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have the metadata/AUTHORS file whose purpose I still don't know. |
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-- juippis |
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