On 2026-02-23, Maxim Cournoyer wrote: > Gabriel Wicki <[email protected]> writes: >> On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 02:10:15PM +0900, Maxim Cournoyer wrote: >>> I think it's more of a good practice than needed; for example you do not >>> have a copyright notice on every page of a novel. Granted, in that case >>> there is usually a sole copyright owner, which is different in Guix. >> This is exactly why I bring it up. We write the lines on top of every >> module because for some reason we think it either hinders people from >> infringement or makes such wrongdoing more obvious. This IMHO is >> esoterics. It might have been good or even best practice, but currently >> it stops us from improving our code base (moving packages to the places >> they should belong), which is bad.
When I split diffoscope out to it's own module, I admittedly copied the whole copyright section from the old file, which is surely wrong in some way, but better to be a little inclusively wrong than exclusively wrong... obviously we wouldn't want to go out of our way to include wrong information(maybe there is a malicious compliance angle there!), but I suspect it shifts the burden of proof regarding copyright challenges a bit. > The two issues seems in opposition to me: legal safeguards vs > convenience; a bit like security vs ease of use :-). Clearly we should include a copyright statment with every line of code! :) > I don't have a strong opinion, but I think if we were to embrace the > lightweight Git authorship + SPDX-style, I believe we should do so to > the project as a whole rather than just the gnu/* package files, which > are likely under copyright as well, at least partially. > > The risks/downsides I see with relying only on git to provide the data: > > 1. You loose the obvious/burned in copyright year a file was last > touched, which can be useful in case only some files were copied in > another project. Copyright years are busywork... :P > 2. The git history becomes even more important: should > we migrate to another system in the future it'd be critical to preserve > it; it also means we can't prune the git history passed some threshold > to e.g. reduce the git repository size (I'm not suggesting to do this, > but that'd be an option we'd forego). the Author of a git commit != to the Author of the copyrightable material != the holder of the copyright (same is true for the dates of the copyrighted material, if you are into that sort of thing)... so I guess I have my doubts about the inclusive accuracy of relying on git history. Various *-by: seem to be a convention in git commits to reflect some of those distinctions... though honestly, it becomes a bit of git archaeology at that point, rather than simply reading the text in a file. > I think it'd be most polite proposing this change in a GCD and/or asking > every single contributor whose name would be removed if they'd agree to > it. At the very least, I would lean on the "and" and suggest both... live well, vagrant
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