On 01/15/2016 11:38 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > 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.
Correct, that's how I do things. And that's what I would like to fix. >> 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. I've just asked this very point with the same example to the FTP masters. Let's see what they say... 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
