On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 21:39:49 -0400 Rich Freeman wrote: > On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 9:03 PM Kent Fredric wrote: > > There really isn't any negative consequence to the person listed on a > copyright notice being "wrong" as far as I can tell. I use quotes > because as long as the person listed contributed SOMETHING to the file > the statement is still accurate, even if non-ideal. I doubt a court > is going to decide a case differently because the person listed on the > copyright notice wrote 20% of a file vs somebody else who wrote 40%. > As far as I'm aware the name listed on a copyright notice isn't > binding at all on a court - the court is free to determine who > actually owns the copyright based on the facts of the situation. The > notice simply serves to inform the recipient of a work that it IS > copyrighted, so that they can't claim innocent infringement. The work > remains copyrighted all the same if the notice is not present, and > future infringement after receiving notice would not be innocent > regardless. Surely then, the most effective and usefully correct copyright notice (for portage trees at least), would be: "Copyright Gentoo Foundation and Contributors" Or similar, instead of abandoning the Gentoo Foundation Copyright and using a random persons name? Otherwise most of the proposal in regards to portage trees, is mostly a waste of time. > (So the "Copyright Gentoo Foundation" lines will be > phased out.) Because otherwise, the objective of putting a humans name there is misleading at best, and serves no objective purpose. If the objective is to simply denote the file has a copyright, that format should do the job. ( Additionally, I have no opposition to generating a package-wide file that notates contributors, such an approach is routinely satisfactory for debian with regards to marking up which files have which licenses without needing to inject the license in the file, and has the benefit of exposing that metadata to consumers who only access via rsync or tarballs, its just in-band in-git data that I find most obnoxious due to being functionally redundant )