On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 2:57 PM Vagrant Cascadian <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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 believe that when we (we understood here as a hypothetical group) choose to use a VCS, the metadata saved by it becomes part of the project itself - from the messages to the opaque machine-generated low-level bits of padding and organization. If we can use the messages and/or the machine-generated metadata to convey copyright info, then we should. > > > > 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
