Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2018-10-14

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

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>>>>> On Thu, 11 Oct 2018, Andrew Savchenko wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:43:52 +0200 Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> The new copyright policy (GLEP 76) leaves it to projects to decide
>> whether they use the long form or the simplified form of the copyright
>> attribution. I would like to ask the council to decide that the
>> simplified attribution [1] shall be used for ebuilds in the Gentoo
>> repository.

> I'd like to voice strongly against this motion.

> Rationale:

> - We have out of the Gentoo repository ebuilds which may be
> incorporated in the main repository and are licensed properly but
> an author requires his copyright in the first line to be preserved.

The author's copyright will be preserved, regardless if he is listed in
a copyright line or not. It would even be preserved if there wasn't any
copyright notice at all.

The sole purpose of having a copyright notice is to protect us against
an "innocent infringement" defense under U.S. law. It really doesn't
matter much who is listed there (so we can list "Gentoo Authors" which
isn't even a legal entity), as long as we have a notice at all.

> GPL-2 allows us to use such ebuilds, but our past copyright policy
> mandating "Gentoo Foundation" doesn't, as well as proposed motion
> which mandates "Gentoo Authors" instead of the list of authors
> including main author if they require so.

It is virtually impossible to account for all authors of an ebuild,
and listing "Gentoo Authors" is only done because of practical
considerations (as I had outlined in the rationale). Also, please don't
confuse the copyright notice with an attribution of authorship.
The latter is achieved by the Git (or another VCS) commit information.
Again, this is already outlined in GLEP 76: "Projects using this scheme
[namely, 'Gentoo Authors'] must track authorship in a VCS".

> - GLEP 76 already did significant harm to our community by
> outlawing current anonymous or pseudonymous contributions. Moreover
> we have people who want to join community, but keep their identity
> hidden. This is understandable, especially for security or privacy
> oriented software. The harm should go no further. We have a lot of
> talks how we need more developers, but what we are doing in many
> steps including GLEP 76 is exactly the opposite: we are creating
> additional barriers due to vague and bureaucratic reasons.

How is that relevant for the proposal at hand?

> Of course if authors wants to use "Gentoo Authors" this should be
> allowed, especially for automatic migration from the "Gentoo
> Foundation" line. But we must preserve the right to use explicit
> list of authors (including "and others" if necessary) if a
> maintainer wants so.

Exactly. The aim of the "simplified attribution" policy is to simplify
modification of ebuilds, because contributors (whether Gentoo developers
or users) shouldn't have to think about the copyright line.

The purpose of the proposal explicitly is *not* to stop anybody from
adding an ebuild with a preexisting copyright notice. However, we should
make it clear that we strongly prefer the simplified form for ebuilds in
the Gentoo repository, entirely for practical reasons.

Ulrich

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