Policy for applying copyright notices

[Livnat Peer]

On 10/25/2011 08:21 PM, Karsten Wade wrote:
> 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.
> 

I started the discussion about credits to file's author and it took a
little turn, assuming no legal issue, my original request was -

I rather not have the author name on the file.
The main reason for that is that file changes over time and after a
while it has little to do with the original version. There are many
contributors to the changes and by having one name on the file we "hide"
the contribution of other developers.

I don't think the above contradicts the open source spirit, on the contrary.

The option i saw on this thread about adding all the names of those who
changed the file over time seems cumbersome to me and i think that's why
we have git history for.

This was discussed in the engine-core project some time ago and we
decided to remove all author credits from the file.

- If not accepted as a general rule for all oVirt projects I would like
to suggest that this can be decided/changed on a project level.

Livnat


> 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
> 
> 
> 
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