On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 08:48:21PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> 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 don't think OpenStack is in a different situation to the vast
majority of open source projects I've worked with or seen. Except
for those projects requiring copyright assignment to a single
entity, it is normal for source files to contain an unreliable
random splattering of Copyright notices. This hasn't seemed to
create a blocking problem for their maintenance in Debian. Loooking
at the debian/copyright files I see most of them have just done a
grep for the 'Copyright' statements & included as is - IOW just
ignored the fact that this is essentially worthless info and included
it regardless.
> 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.
3/ Do nothing, just populate debian/copyright with the random
set of 'Copyright' lines that happen to be the source files,
as appears to be common practice across many debian packages
eg the kernel package
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/l/linux/linux_3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u3_copyright
"Copyright: 1991-2012 Linus Torvalds and many others"
if its good enough for the Debian kernel package, it should be
good enough for openstack packages too IMHO.
Regards,
Daniel
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