Hi Gabriel, Gabriel Wicki <[email protected]> writes:
> Hi Maxim, my favorite documentation-team fellow! > > On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 02:10:15PM +0900, Maxim Cournoyer wrote: >> > 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. > This is exactly why I bring it up. We write the lines on top of every > module because for some reason we think it either hinders people from > infringement or makes such wrongdoing more obvious. This IMHO is > esoterics. It might have been good or even best practice, but currently > it stops us from improving our code base (moving packages to the places > they should belong), which is bad. The two issues seems in opposition to me: legal safeguards vs convenience; a bit like security vs ease of use :-). I don't have a strong opinion, but I think if we were to embrace the lightweight Git authorship + SPDX-style, I believe we should do so to the project as a whole rather than just the gnu/* package files, which are likely under copyright as well, at least partially. The risks/downsides I see with relying only on git to provide the data: 1. You loose the obvious/burned in copyright year a file was last touched, which can be useful in case only some files were copied in another project. 2. The git history becomes even more important: should we migrate to another system in the future it'd be critical to preserve it; it also means we can't prune the git history passed some threshold to e.g. reduce the git repository size (I'm not suggesting to do this, but that'd be an option we'd forego). [...] > (@ALL) Can we agree on simplifying the copyright lines and keeping > track of authorship in our git history? And replace the dozens of > copyright lines (at least in the package modules) with a generic > >> Copyright © 2012-2026 The GNU Guix Project >> Please consult git history for authorship information I think the copyright would need to refer to a collective (individuals), rather than the project, so something like: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- Copyright © 2012-2026 The GNU Guix Contributors SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Example spot in the wild (Linux kernel): --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- // SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ OR MIT /* * MacBook Pro (14-inch, M1 Max, 2021) * * target-type: J314c * * Copyright The Asahi Linux Contributors */ --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- I think it'd be most polite proposing this change in a GCD and/or asking every single contributor whose name would be removed if they'd agree to it. -- Thanks, Maxim
