Hi, On 2026-10-26 at 13:55-05:00, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2026-10-26T16:19:18+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > > One thing that seems very unlikely to matter in court is the FSF "15 > > lines changed" rule. > > These points may be true, but I don't find them relevant. I don't know > if there is only one reason for the FSF's "15 line rule", but if there > is, I suspect it has to do with reducing administrative overhead, > particularly in keeping the wheels of contribution greased for the > relatively large number of people who submit one-line fixes. > > By insisting upon copyright assignment, the FSF created a high-friction, > high-overhead process for itself, [...] So if you set a threshold > below which copyright assignment is deemed unnecessary, you dramatically > decrease the volume of copyright assignments you have to process. [...] > > If someone wants to undertake the draft of such a policy, I note first > that they should (1) review my survey of copyright issues in groff's > "HACKING" file and (2) be advised that I'm unlikely to want to adopt a > new "threshold" practice before I've finished conforming the groff code > base to my understanding of the existing one.
While I share the same understanding about the intention behind the 15-line rule, for the purpose of copyright assignment, let's quote a couple lines below: > Keep in mind, however, that a series of minor changes > by the same person can add up to a significant contribution. > What counts is the total contribution of the person; > it is irrelevant which parts of it were contributed when. On the matter of "Copyright Notices", the same manual also has a section, which noted > You should maintain a proper copyright notice and a license notice > in each nontrivial file in the package. (Any file more than > ten lines long is nontrivial for this purpose.) [...] > > But if contributors are not all assigning their copyrights > to a single copyright holder, it can easily happen that one file > has several copyright holders. Each contributor of nontrivial text > is a copyright holder. > > In that case, you should always include a copyright notice > in the name of main copyright holder of the file. You can also > include copyright notices for other copyright holders as well, > and this is a good idea for those who have contributed a large amount > and for those who specifically ask for notices in their names. > (Sometimes the license on code that you copy in may require preserving > certain copyright notices.) But you don’t have to include a notice > for everyone who contributed to the file (which would be > rather inconvenient). In other words, the test files might be spared from a copyright notice, and the principles noted in the HACKING file aligns with GNU's recommendations. Do note that the threshold is slighly different, though, and the copyright notice is different from the register of copyright, per "Recording Contributors": > Only the contributions that are legally significant > for copyright purposes (...) need to be listed. [...] > > Please keep these records in a file named AUTHORS > in the source directory for the program itself. Cheers, Phong
