On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 6:31 AM, Andreas K. Huettel
<dilfri...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Am Montag 16 Februar 2015, 06:13:10 schrieb Mike Frysinger:
>
>> even then, deleting an ebuild purely due to different copyright is
>> complete bs.
>
> The requirement for Gentoo copyright in the main tree is not optional, but has
> been policy for a very long time.
>
> Just because you've been around forever doesnt mean you can break the rules
> that everyone else is supposed to follow.
>

++

I'm all for working things out, but this is really non-negotiable at
the moment since copyright is legally messy.  Patrick couldn't just
change the copyright line, and since this is a new package the impact
of removing it is least felt if it is done right away.  It can
certainly be re-introduced with the correct copyright line, assuming
it can be legally contributed in this manner (the responsibility of
the committer to verify, DCO or not).

I think there are benefits if we loosen the policy, but the best I
could come up with for making that possible was quite messy with the
need to keep track of who contributed what and who assigned copyright
on what and all that stuff.

One dev contributes an ebuild which is copyright Microsoft GPL-2.  I
modify 10 lines in it and copyright those Richard Freeman and
copyright it GPL-2+.  What goes on the copyright line now, and at what
point have enough contributions accumulated to allow it to move to
GPL-3 if we decide to do that with the whole tree, and remove the MS
name since they haven't done anything with it in eons?

The draft policy addressed this, but feedback was that it was going to
be painful to keep track of who did what, and I can't argue with that.
Git blame combined with a tool and database of who has signed an FLA
would help a great deal here.  The policy itself didn't actually get
much argument beyond that, so maybe creating such a tool might be all
that is needed to make the switch.

For those who haven't read it, my latest drafts:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~rich0/copyrightpolicy.xml

But, until this becomes actual policy, the current policy stands,
whether repoman flags it or not.

-- 
Rich

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