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

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

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>>>>> On Sun, 30 Sep 2018, Sergei Trofimovich wrote:

> Hello all!
> 14 October (in 2 weeks from now)
> at 19:00 UTC Council will meet again.

> Please provide agenda items you would like council@ to
> look at (and act) as a reply to this email.

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.

Rationale:

- Policy of the Gentoo repository is a global issue that should be
decided by the council.

- Quoting the GLEP: "Especially for ebuild repositories, constantly
keeping track of the main copyright holder of any file would be rather
inconvenient and tedious." This is particularly true for ebuilds in the
Gentoo repository, where tracing the main contributor of all ebuilds
would be a major effort. A developer who is updating an ebuild shouldn't
have to do a copyright audit, in order to find out if the notice is
still accurate or needs to be updated. Using the simplified attribution
avoids that.

- Changing an existing copyright notice (e.g., from "Dev. E. Loper and
others" to "Gentoo Authors") could be problematic from a legal point
of view, so using the simplified form from the very beginning may be
preferable.

- Our previous policy to require "Gentoo Foundation" in the copyright
notice doesn't seem to have caused any significant problems with
contributors. So I would expect "Gentoo Authors" to work as well.
If necessary, organisations that hold copyright to parts of the tree
could be traced in an AUTHORS file. (That would resemble the scheme
used by the Chromium project [2].)

Ulrich

[1] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html#simplified-attribution
[2] https://www.chromium.org/developers/contributing-code#TOC-Legal-stuff

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