On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 7:31 PM, Matt Turner <matts...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Yeah, it seems to be painful no matter what you do (CLA, copyright > assignment, listing copyright holders) just in different ways :) >
Well, the advantage of assignment is that it does simplify copyright tracking, since you own the copyright on everything. The problem is that it potentially cuts out a lot of contributions. There is also the problem of nations that do not allow assignment (though that could also be fixed in theory by just ending the Gentoo German conspiracy). I personally tend to favor a mandatory DCO (we absolutely need to know the copyright status of our code), and a voluntary FLA (which I tend to prefer to outright assignment as I think it lines up well with our always-free social contract). The issue remains of what to do with the copyright notice. I suggested just having enough names on the line to account for 51% of the code, which as far as I can tell is completely legal. That doesn't preclude just listing all the names (which is ugly, but administratively simple). But, that does help cover us in cases where we have some ebuild where we can only account for 60% of it. It also allows us to borrow anything from any other project that already has its copyrights well-documented. FYI, one of the original sparks that drove some of this thinking was the eudev copyright fiasco (which like a lot of systemd-related stuff was blown out of proportion IMO with things being attributed to malice which were simply a lack of thinking things through). This was the first time Gentoo really forked and internalized a major external project, and there was a clash between our previous practices designed for dev-written code and the large import of external code. Under the draft copyright policy we'd have just maintained the previous copyright headers, perhaps just reformatting them to the top of the file per our convention if they weren't already there (which is completely legal). If at some point enough code in a file got rewritten to have majority-FLA authorship we'd have the option to change it to Gentoo and others, though we wouldn't have to. -- Rich
