On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Peter Stuge <[email protected]> wrote: > Justin (jlec) wrote: >> This is part of the set of topics which we >> cover outside the scope of the quizzes. > > A brief comment from reality is that this legal problem is quit > likely a significant hurdle for many potential developers - as for me. > > If you want contributing to be easy, overhead like this can't exist.
It isn't clear to me what the overhead is here. The only things devs need to do with respect to copyright is follow the law and ensure that ebuilds have the correct copyright notice. Following the law doesn't always make things easier, but that isn't something we really have any choice in. Putting the correct copyright notice at the top of your ebuilds isn't that difficult - it is already in the ebuild template and any other ebuild in the tree you might copy from. There are concerns that the current policy isn't ideal legally and that it restricts our options for accepting outside code. Those are legitimate concerns, but any change isn't likely to make things any easier on contributors. In fact, many of the potential improvements are likely to make things harder, which is a big reason why there hasn't been a huge rush to change things. It would be nice if we could just tell our developer candidates that they don't have to be concerned with copyright at all, but that would not be very good for any of us. Our mirror sponsors would drop us like hot potatoes, anybody using us for professional work would be concerned about needing to double-check everything we do so that they don't get in trouble, and sooner or later we could end up getting sued by somebody or at least subject to DMCA takedowns. Gentoo is very careful to comply with copyright law, and when we do struggle with issues they tend to be in very gray areas (which we usually end up mirror restricting anyway to keep our mirror sponsors out of any risk). While the trustees and members of the licensing team tend to get into discussions around legal details (often tapping into outside resources when doing so), the average developer really just needs to make sure that they commit their own work into the tree itself, have permission for Gentoo to use the work of others, that they stick the standard copyright notice in their ebuilds, and that anything in a SRC_URI is under a redistributable license or set RESTRICT="mirror". Obviously this is a quick summary and not a substitute for the devmanual - I'm sure there are one-off situations that come up that I'm not thinking of. -- Rich
