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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 2:41 PM Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> This is  what concerns me as well. All of the folks in this thread who
>> want to forbid multiline copyright notices have yet to convince me that
>> there is a technical argument for doing so.
>
> I don't believe the technical arguments have much basis; instead the argument is about community and humanpower.

I've yet to see any technical arguments.  I certainly haven't made any.

There is no technical reason to allow multi-line notices, and there is
no technical reason to forbid them.  This is entirely a non-technical
issue.

I think they should be forbidden for a number of non-technical reasons:

1.  They add clutter to ebuilds.  At the very least they should be put
at the bottom of ebuilds and not at the top, and anybody editing an
ebuild should be free to move a multiline notice to the bottom if they
see it at the top.

2.  It strikes me as being fairly anti-community.  Basically the
companies that give us the most trouble get to stick their names all
over ebuilds, while freely benefitting from hundreds of other ebuilds
that others have contributed without any care for sticking their names
on stuff.  Sony should be contributing because they want to
contribute, not to stick their names on things.  Or if they want to
sponsor us they should do so under the normal terms for doing so,
which generally involve more than contributing a couple of lines of
ebuild boilerplate.

3.  It opens up a slippery slope.  Once you say one person can stick
their names on something, how long until everybody and their uncle
starts doing it and an ebuild with a long history like glibc has three
pages of contributor names at the top (and IMO glibc is one of those
few ebuilds that actually seems non-trival)?

4.  The people digging in to try to force this policy have no interest
in participating in the Gentoo community, or actually advocating for
their position.  It seems that they simply consider their position
undebatable and expect us to just accept it because heaven forbid one
developer not be allowed to contribute during business hours, despite
many others having no issues with this at all since their employers
are more reasonable.

IMO Gentoo (and the members of its community) should be using this as
an opportunity to tarnish Sony's reputation, not bend over backwards
to cater to a random request of a company lawyer who seemingly isn't
interested in actually discussing their policy.  This isn't Sony
contributing to open source, this is Sony interfering with what has
basically been routine practice in the community for 15-20 years.

-- 
Rich