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

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 03:40:01PM -0500, Sarah White wrote:
> > On 11/23/18 3:25 PM, Ian Stakenvicius wrote:
> > > On 2018-11-23 3:23 p.m., Sarah White wrote:
> > >
> > >>
> > >> Either way: multiline copyright notices are legally valid,
> > >> or is that meant to be disputed? I'm not clear on the
> > >> intent for this comment:
> > >>
> > >> ["...don't have to be listed in a notice"]
> > >>
> > >
> > > legal validity != legal requirement
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Sure. You're not wrong.
> >
> > You've left out the other section which starts:
> >
> > ["The interest in removing or discouraging..."]
> >
> > What's the purpose of removing or discouraging
> > something which doesn't harm gentoo, but rather,
> > helps get more support from: ["contributors who
> > are in a situation where a contract may require a
> > copyright notice for anything done on-the-clock"]
> >
> > ... and/or other harmless reasons.
> >
> > The intent / reasoning for removal or prohibition
> > of a multiline copyright notice has tenuous footing,
> > and worries me that nobody in this thread has made
> > a stronger argument than: ["we're not required by any
> > law to allow a different copyright notice, so we'll
> > require it to be a gentoo authors copyright notice."]
>
> This is  what concerns me as well. All of the folks in this thread who
> want to forbid multiline copyright notices have yet to convince me that
> there is a technical argument for doing so. If there is one, I'm willing
> to be convinced, but that's not what I'm hearing.


I don't believe the technical arguments have much basis; instead the
argument is about community and humanpower.

 - There is an argument (non technical) that files in the ebuild repository
should carry a copyright notice to signal that the content has a copyright.
 - A GLEP was written (glep76) to standardize what this should be. One of
the (unstated) goals of the GLEP is to avoid spending time managing the
copyright declarations; so it was decided to have 2 forms, the short form
("Gentoo Authors") and the traditional form (for when we import code and
cannot remove notices.)

The crux of the argument is about the maintenance of these copyright
notices; not about the bytes they occupy or the CPU time spend reading them.

 - When is it allowed to add extra notices?
 - When is it allowed to remove extra notices?

This is ultimately the problem I think we see with the SEI attribution. We
don't understand *why* Sony wants the notice there and because of that we
don't understand the answers to the above. What I want to avoid happening
is getting sued by Sony because the notices were added and then later
removed; but we have not received guidance on this and I think it blocks us
moving forward.

-A


>
> For example, If there are really performance reasons, let's see the
> benchmarks
> proving it.
>

> William
>
>