Policy for applying copyright notices

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 10:26:11AM +0200, Doron Fediuck wrote:
> 
> I was following the Apache sample you gave. If ovirt.org is not a legal entity
> for intellectual property matters, and contributer does not belong to a company
> we'll get to a state which every file in the project will be copyrighted to
> a different person. This is too chaotic.

I'm confused about what the real issue is here.

I haven't honestly studied a lot of FOSS source files, just when I
needed to. The copyright and license header is there in a comment
field, I skip by, and start hunting for whatever I need. Even when the
copyright is several lines long.

Having these details in the files and in the git record is important
for when we need to contact copyright holders for any reason.

The most important thing AIUI is that the files are _licensed_
properly. As long as the files are ASL, we can use them in the
project, regardless of the copyright holder.

As someone else said in this list, how FOSS developers write their
copyright notice is often a very personal thing. Some use their @work
email, some their @personal email, some their @hackerspace email, and
so forth. Since this is important to people and exercising that right
does no real harm to the source files, it's best to leave the final
decision up to people as to how they mark it.

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:   Red Hat Community Architecture & Leadership
uri:             http://communityleadershipteam.org
                        http://TheOpenSourceWay.org
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
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