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

[Sarah White]

On 11/23/18 3:42 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 3:23 PM Sarah White <kuzetsa@××××××××××.ovh> wrote:
>>
>> On 11/23/18 2:46 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>> Nobody is suggesting that multiple copyright owners shouldn't be
>>> allowed.  Merely that multiple copyright owners shouldn't be named in
>>> the copyright notice.
>>
>> The interest in removing or discouraging a more verbose,
>> explicit copyright notice would suggest the only legitimate
>> interest should be assumed to be in "gentoo authors", and
>> for no other entity(s) or person(s) need have any stake
>> in having a well-structured copyright notice (any format)
>
> I'm not sure what "well-structured" means.

SPDX is well-structured, and was previously given
as an example (I believe it was in this thread)

quoted / cited message:

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 02:18:35 -0500
From: Sarah White <kuzetsa@××××××××××.ovh>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o

On 11/13/2018 09:46 PM, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 06:17:17PM -0800, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:32 AM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o>
wrote:
>>>
>>> Since we do not do copyright assignment any more and the glep allows for
>>> traditional attribution, if some entity
>>> (company, person etc) has a desire for a copyright notice in
>>> their work, the case for not allowing this is very weak at best, so

{{ snip }}

SPDX-style license blocks have a well-defined layout
(I'm a fan / several linux kernel developers are too)

... and SPDX displays the copyright notice in a way which is
fully compatible with, and improves transparency for copyleft

>>
>>>
>>> As you can see from my example, line length will quickly become
>>> problematic in this format because all lines in in-tree ebuilds are
>>> supposed to be under 80 characters.
>>

{{ snip }}

>>
>>> Multiple-lines would be much easier to maintain, and
>>> there is no cost performance wise for them.
>>
>> Except for spam in our files.
>
> And how does that affect performance?
>

it shouldn't. most interpreted languages have sensible handling for
comments / JIT compilation, and for compiled languages there's normally
zero runtime penalty for comment blocks of any kind.

even if a QA tool has a bottleneck when scanning comments, there's no
reason to believe this is a mission-critical failure and the performance
bottleneck will slow down development.

>> Heck, repoman complains if you stick two newlines in a row in the
>> file, and now we basically want to add a revision history to the file?
>
> No, a revision history comes from vcs.
>

yep

>>
>> Just say no.  Fit it on one line.
>>
>> But, if you had to have multiple lines, then just wrap the existing
>> notice.  Don't turn it into some kind of revision history.  Just list
>> one year range and whatever list of entities you feel compelled to
>> list.  That is the proper way to do a notice.
>
> No sir, it isn't.
>
> Look anywhere outside the Gentoo tree. For that matter, take the Linux
> kernel, or even in the systemd source, there are several places with
> multiple copyright notices in them.

indeed. it's done in a sensible way too (see comments above)

> William
>

-- kuza