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

[Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 8:51 PM William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 06:38:45PM -0800, Matt Turner wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 3:12 PM William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 09:20:52AM -0600, William Hubbs wrote:
> > > > On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 06:04:00PM -0800, Matt Turner wrote:
> > > > > On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 9:48 AM William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > The GLEP says about the "Simplified Attribution":
> > > > >
> > > > > > Projects using this scheme must track authorship in a VCS, unless they list all authors of copyrightable contributions in an AUTHORS file.
> > > > >
> > > > > Would it be acceptable on your side to be listed in the AUTHORS file
> > > > > (which as far as I know has not been created yet)?
> > > >
> > > > I will get this answer today once I get to the office.
> > > >
> > > > There was also talk about adding a tag to commits that listed the
> > > > copyright holder for that commit but it never went anywhere. I would
> > > > propose something like:
> > > >
> > > > Copyright: <copyright notice>
> > >
> > > Putting the copyright notice in the commits might be the way to do this.
> > > If that's what we want, I suggest something like my example above.
> > >
> > > > > I'd be perfectly happy to ship an AUTHORS file in the ebuild repo that
> > > > > contains the names and emails of everyone and every company that has
> > > > > contributed to the repo.
> > > >
> > > > We probably should do this anyway and ship the AUTHORS file as part of
> > > > the rsync repository. You don't need it for the git repo since the
> > > > information is available via VCS.
> > >
> > > The AUTHORS file will contain AUTHORS, not copyright holders.  Usually
> > > they are the same, but not always.
> >
> > Let me try to explain what I'm suggesting.
> >
> > As I understand it, the Simplified Attribution, which looks like
> >
> > | Copyright YEARS Gentoo Authors
> >
> > is like a pointer to the AUTHORS file, indicating that those listed
> > hold copyright on things in this repo.
> >
> > I'm suggesting that in lieu of listing copyright holders explicitly in
> > each file (which as we've discussed is a pain, inaccurate, and
> > requires tedious maintenance) that we list copyright holders in the
> > AUTHORS file and use the Simplified Attribution nearly exclusively.
>
> Do you mean the way it is suggested here without the discussion of the
> CLA since we do not use a CLA?
>
> https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/authors/
>
> That would also mean we don't have to list everyone, just those
> copyright holders who wish to be listed.

That's a great description. Yes, that's what I mean. Thanks for the link!