Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications

[Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org>]

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On Wed, 14 Nov 2018 07:31:02 -0800 Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 6:36 AM Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > What's the main problem of most FOSS including Gentoo? Lack of
> > human power. And here you propose to neglect contributions if they
> > want a proper and legal and allowed by GPL attribution.
> 
> Where is anybody talking about "attribution?"
> 
> This is about copyright notice, which is NOT about crediting anybody
> with anything or giving attribution.  It is about communicating the
> fact that code is copyrighted, so that people can't claim that they
> didn't know when the Foundation wants to sue them.  I'm sure they're
> about to start doing that anytime...

It is your intent, but not full consequences of such statement.
Lack of proper copyright notice may be considered as a copyright or
authorship violation in some jurisdictions. Gentoo is used not only
in the US.
 
> Also, this doesn't seem to have been a problem in the past, and yet
> our policy was far less free then.
> 
> > A few extra lines in the header doesn't as much as
> > inability to import GPL ebuilds to the tree due to our
> > questionable copyright line policy.
> 
> What is it that we want to import but can't today?

I have this problem for years(!!) with hasufel overlay from which I
wanted to take voip-related stuff. Also we have wltjr's overlay
which will be useful for java packages.
 
> > > But, if you had to have multiple lines, then just wrap the existing
> > > notice.  Don't turn it into some kind of revision history.
> >
> > That's what most FOSS software does. I see no reason why we should
> > be different.
> 
> Do you have a citation for this?  I'm not aware of many FOSS projects
> that use copyright notices as a revision history, let alone "most."

git grep through git repositories of large FOSS projects will be a
citation you requested.

> > IMO the best solution will be to recommend "Gentoo Authors"
> > attribution, but to allow additional copyright lines including the
> > case where "Gentoo Authors" is one of such lines.
> 
> IMO doing this will just cause everybody and their uncle to insist on
> putting their names in various places.

There is nothing wrong with this.

> We've done just fine for going on 20 years not allowing any notice
> other than "Copyright xxx Gentoo Foundation."

Except for it was entirely wrong except for early days of Gentoo.

>  Now we open things up a
> tiny bit and suddenly everybody and their uncle is saying that their
> employers won't let them contribute code unless they stick their
> company name in there.  What have they been doing for the last decade?

They were not contributing or less contributing to Gentoo.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko

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