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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:32 AM William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Since we do not do copyright assignment any more and the glep allows for
> traditional attribution, if some entity
> (company, person etc) has a desire for a copyright notice in
> their work, the case for not allowing this is very weak at best, so we will
> end up with more and more ebuilds that want to use traditional copyright
> attribution, and once an ebuild is switched over, it is problematic to
> switch back.

So, the purpose of allowing specific copyright holders to be named was
to cover cases where we're forking foreign code, not to basically
introduce a variant on the BSD advertising clause.  IMO people who are
only willing to contribute FOSS if their name gets put in a prominent
location might do better to contribute elsewhere.

>
> As you can see from my example, line length will quickly become
> problematic in this format because all lines in in-tree ebuilds are
> supposed to be under 80 characters.

Indeed, this is tone of he problems with allowing people to spam the
copyright notice.  It is basically the advertising clause in a
different place.

>
> It is also problematic because the relationship between the years and
> contributors becomes unclear unless we allow ranges and single years in
> the copyright notice, which would lead to something like this:
>
> # Copyright <years1>, <years2>, <years3>, ... <yearsn+1>  [contributor1,] [contributor2,] [contributor3,] ...  [contributorn] and others

The purpose of a copyright notice is to declare that the file is
copyrighted, and that is it.

It isn't a comprehensive list of everybody who holds a copyright on the file.

It isn't a revision history.

There is no need to list various mixes of years and authors.  Just
list the first and last year, and whatever copyright holders are
necessary.

> Multiple-lines would be much easier to maintain, and
> there is no cost performance wise for them.

Except for spam in our files.

Heck, repoman complains if you stick two newlines in a row in the
file, and now we basically want to add a revision history to the file?

Just say no.  Fit it on one line.

But, if you had to have multiple lines, then just wrap the existing
notice.  Don't turn it into some kind of revision history.  Just list
one year range and whatever list of entities you feel compelled to
list.  That is the proper way to do a notice.

-- 
Rich