Hi Gabriel, Gabriel Wicki <[email protected]> writes:
> Hi again! > > 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? I think it's more of a good practice than needed; for example you do not have a copyright notice on every page of a novel. Granted, in that case there is usually a sole copyright owner, which is different in Guix. > 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? If the code as been thoroughly rewritten to something different, than the original copyright should no longer holds, if I understand correctly: that's a classic workaround to incompatibly licensed software you want to include in your project: you rewrite it. > Are really the mentioned people the legal copyright holders? They should be yes. > And is writing these lines really the only and best way to ensure their > rights? It's probably not the only way but it's better than a flat list of authors (kept in a file) in that it at least captures with more precision which part of the code is under the copyright of whom. It could be even more detailed saying which portion of a file were authored by whom, but that'd be unmaintainable, so I think it strikes a balance. > Apart from a possible cleanup effort, it is definitively worth > documenting how we handle the issues of ownership and copyright in our > reference manual. It's already covered summarily in the README.org file at the root of the project (* Copyright Notices). The GNU project also documents Legal Matters and their suggested way to handle these things in (info "(maintain) Recording Contributors") -- I think this manual is shipped with Autoconf. -- Thanks, Maxim
