Hello, After recently submitting an updated ebuild for inclusion, I've become concerned with the statement "Copyright 1999-2004 Gentoo Foundation" that appears within packages, for a number of reasons:
First, by using a date range in the copyright declaration, it is given that updated changes to the copyrighted work have been made and released to the public in each of the consecutive covered years that are listed. In the case of updated ebuilds, the first ebuild for a given package may not have been released in 1999, making such a date range incorrect. For ebuilds that add usability for presently unavailable software, only the year of release would be necessary. A good piece of information on the subject is listed on the GNU website, <http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Copyright-Notices>, and to quote a small section: "The list of year numbers should include each year in which you finished preparing a version which was actually released, and which was an ancestor of the current version. Please reread the paragraph above, slowly and carefully. It is important to understand that rule precisely, much as you would understand a complicated C statement in order to hand-simulate it." Whether a new ebuild that's released for an updated software package constitutes and update to an older ebuild or an independent addition is open to speculation (as the ebuilds are technically independent entities), though I'm more inclined to side with the former. In which case, most of the ebuilds for any given package were not in existence at the beginning of 1999, and should not contain that date as a copyrightable year. Second, in reference to displaying "Gentoo Foundation" as the copyright holder, merely submitting an ebuild with that statement is not legally sufficient to establish copyright ownership or disclamation of copyright. While the developers who have signed copyright assignment agreements in writing satisfy the requirements needed to define Gentoo as the owner of a piece of software, independent users such as myself do not not meet those conditions. An obvious example of that inadequacy would be having a user develop a malicious piece of code, and stamping a "Copyright (C) 2005 International Business Machines Corporation" notice at the beginning of the program; it would be unreasonable to expect that a court of law would consider that adequate copyright assignment, as anyone would be able to wildly assign copyrights without any accountability. In total, there are 28,523 references to "Gentoo Foundation" in the Portage tree (not including the distfiles), the majority of which are copyright notices. Even assuming that Portage itself is free of user-submitted (and unassigned) significant changes, the same cannot be said of the tree. Adding a GLEP for this issue may be helpful, however aside from that, what actions should be taken to correct this problem? -- Anthony Gorecki Ectro-Linux Foundation
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