This isn't the first time I'm calling for it. Let's hope this time, I'll be heard.
Randomly, contributors put their company names into source code. When they do, then effectively, this tells that a given source file copyright holder is whatever is claimed, even though someone from another company may have patched it. As a result, we have a huge mess. It's impossible for me, as a package maintainer, to accurately set the copyright holder names in the debian/copyright file, which is a required by the Debian FTP masters. I see 2 ways forward: 1/ Require everyone to give-up copyright holding, and give it to the OpenStack Foundation. 2/ Maintain a copyright-holder file in each project. The later is needed if we want to do things correctly. Leaving the possibility for everyone to just write (c) MyCompany LLC randomly in the source code doesn't cut it. Expecting that a package maintainer should double-guess copyright holding just by reading the email addresses of "git log" output doesn't work either. Please remember that a copyright holder has nothing to do with the license, neither with the author of some code. So please do *not* take over this thread, and discuss authorship or licensing. Whatever we choose, I think we should ban having copyright holding text within our source code. While licensing is a good idea, as it is accurate, the copyright holding information isn't and it's just missleading. If I was the only person to choose, I'd say let's go for 1/, but probably managers of every company wont agree. Some thoughts anyone? Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo) __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev