Hi Joshua, joshua stein wrote on Thu, Jun 09, 2016 at 12:21:26PM -0500: > On Thu, 09 Jun 2016 at 19:04:27 +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: >> Gerhard Roth wrote on Wed, Jun 08, 2016 at 03:08:52PM +0200:
>>> +.\" Copyright (c) 2016 genua mbH >>> + * Copyright (c) 2016 genua mbH >> These kinds of Copyright notices without the name of the actual author >> are misleading. The purpose of a Copyright notice is to inform the >> reader who enjoys rights with respect to the Works; while they are >> not legally required to establish Copyright and purely of advisory >> nature, it is hard in practice, often almost impossible, to find out >> who holds rights without them. So putting incorrect or incomplete >> information in Copyright notices defeats the very purpose of these >> notices. Please never do that. > Can we stop all this bullshit bikeshedding and just get this driver > imported? Just to be clear: I didn't intend to say that the exact wording of Copyright notices should prevent import (unless the license is unacceptable of course, which is clearly not the case here). Of course, i'm in no position to comment on kernel code. > This is getting so ridiculous. I do not consider making Copyright notices and licences as clear and complete as possible "ridiculous". The finer details are of course not as important as the code itself, but even getting the details right makes things better. It is not all that difficult. With the ISC license, the purpose of the Copyright line is to name the author because he or she retains the Moral Rights. All other (economic) rights are freely licensed to the public. I consider it important that everybody be aware of this one simple idea. It is central to the way OpenBSD attributes and licenses its software. Yes, this fundamental idea is quite different from the way for example NetBSD or the FSF do it. Also note that failing to mention the author in a Copyright notice is not a choice of "how to licence the code", but an omission in a statement of fact. The author is free to choose the license terms (and to transfer economic rights, of course). It is the redistibutor's (the OpenBSD project's) responsibility to make it clear who owns rights on the code it distributes. Sometimes, you only get that out of the CVS logs. Again, that certainly doesn't hinder import, but i consider it somewhat unfortunate when it happens. My remaining answers concern details of less, mostly historical, importance: [...] > There is tons of code in our tree that has a copyright line of a > corporate entity. Sure, but those are mostly historical leftovers, and some also contain slight defects. The most common case is probably this one: * Copyright (c) 1989, 1993 * The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Note that the UCB CSRG had very serious issues in U.S. courts, so they definitely had to focus on U.S. law and were naturally less concerned with the Berne Convention. Besides, even those files usually say something like this: * This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by * Kevin Fall. And yet besides, the original BSD licenses (four and even three clauses) were not as free as the ISC license; they put some material conditions on the redistributor, however easy to comply with. * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * 3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors * may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software * without specific prior written permission. In that case, it does matter slightly who holds the economic rights. For the ISC license, it matters much less. > "The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.", "Carnegie-Mellon University", etc. Both are U.S. legal entities, so maybe they do indeed intend to violate international law and strip authors of inalienable rights. Of course, internationally, that is null and void, and we should add the author names when missing (outside the license, of course). Obviously, it's not a high priority for existing code, but we can at least make new files get it right. > Your argument makes no sense Do you mean to say that owning some ISC-licensed code may provide some benefit to a company? Which one, exactly? > and you are in no position to tell Gerhard to force him Of course i'm not trying to force anything. > to go get the code re-licensed (which makes no sense anyway, as he > probably wrote it on company time). Even when working on company time, the Copyright originates in him. In the working contract, the company may have reserved the right to have the economic rights transferred, but exercising that right makes no sense for code that is intended to be put under an ISC license. No re-licensing is involved here. The question is only whether the company insists in first claiming the economic rights of the code before giving it away. It's actually simpler to just license it freely without transferring the economic rights first. But as i said, just adding the author name is suffficent if the company (or the author) does want to perform the "first take then give" dance. Yours, Ingo
