Hey Gabriel, Gabriel Wicki <[email protected]> skribis:
> We should consider cleaning up our codebase somewhat—at least to the > extent where it becomes clear (or can be clarified) for new contributors > where which part of code belongs. Our package modules seem (in some > places) especially unordered. Ordering them is not such a big issue, > but cleaning up the modules and retaining correct copyright lines is, > indeed. Since I couldn't find it documented and could not find a > satisfying answer through web searches I ask here: are these by-author > copyright lines really needed? For what jurisdiction and what are the > rules to include them? Should we delete them, when for example all > changes by a contributor C are overwritten over time by other > contributions and none of the original committer C are still in place? > > Are really the mentioned people the legal copyright holders? And is > writing these lines really the only and best way to ensure their rights? The people mentioned are supposed to be copyright holders, yes, though that’s not something we verify (and it would be hard to do); we rely on authors. The goal was to keep a good record of copyright holders, like most free software projects would traditionally do (a notable exception being Linux, which probably made the SCO attack easier). However, I’ve come to think that this has questionable utility, particularity for gnu/packages/*.scm, most of which is essentially a database comprised of things barely “legally significant” (in the sense that there’s little or no creativity, which is what determines whether something is copyrightable). In Guix-Science, we recently removed those long copyright headers with a single SPDX license line: https://codeberg.org/guix-science/guix-science/issues/196 I would personally be in favor of doing something similar at least for gnu/packages/*.scm. Thanks for briging it up! Ludo’.
