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

[Andrew Savchenko]

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