On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Can't we just only require the correct license statement and leave all > copyright statements as they are in whatever form? >
Obviously appealing for its simplicity. But, I can see some issues: 1. What if you want to import multiple code snippets with different copyright notices into the same file? 2. Do we want to retain the option to sue somebody who steals GPL code and uses it contrary to the license? Will inaccurate or absent notices hinder that? 3. What if I as an author want to add myself to the copyright line? When can I do that? 4. What if we borrow a small bit of code from some company, it ends up having the only copyright notice in the entire file, and then they use that as justification for using the entirety of the file (mostly Gentoo work) in a proprietary-licensed work? 5. If we start to accumulate conflicting copyright notices, can we ever trim some out? One of the goals of the policy I drafted was to have somewhat clear rules about what goes on the copyright line, and nobody would ever have their names taken off of it unless their contribution ended up not being in the top 50% or whatever. I was thinking about this and wondering if an automated tool could parse git author headers and auto-generate an up-to-date attribution. For this to work every commit would need to have correct author attribution (so if you borrow FooCo code, you do it in a commit that has an Author: FooCo header and not your own name - signed-off-by would still be yourself). Basically do a git blame, determine author for each line, substituted Gentoo for any authors which are on record as signing an FLA, word count those, then sort descending and accumulate authors until 50% of the lines in the file are accounted for. Sounds like a nice little project. I think the kernel actually attributes authors correctly - I might try running it on their repository. The migrated Gentoo repositories should also work. Something like that could even go into repoman. I think the auto-changing of the copyright notice isn't such a bad thing if it is on the basis of authors recorded by individual committers who are signing DCOs confirming this data is correct. The copyright notice is basically just a summary of the more complete data in the repo. -- Rich
