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Re: Why do we list individual copyright holders?



On 2017-12-19 15:17:56 +0100 (+0100), Thomas Goirand wrote:
[...]
> I wish you good luck with that. I attempted *twice* to have the
> copyright holder information attached to each upstream project on
> upstream OpenStack, and twice this was a failure. Maybe I'm not good
> with communication, but I don' think it's the bigger factor. I just
> think upstream doesn't care, they (wrongly) think that licensing is
> enough, when clearly, it's not for Debian (we also care the copyright
> holding part).

If you can please attempt (again) to clarify what you're looking to
have included in upstream releases with regard to copyright holder
information, I'll see what I can whip up. It's up to individual
contributors (authors and reviewers) as to whether a given patch
makes a significant enough change to a particular file to warrant
adding a copyright holder or year in it. I can certainly at least
work on helping standardize them such that they can be scraped
efficiently and aggregated through automation.

Also worth noting, the OpenStack community has been operating under
comments from legal counsel indicating that the Apache Software
License version 2 doesn't explicitly require a manifest of copyright
holders. If people choose to note copyright over at least some of a
file then it's generally honored, but the list of copyright holders
you could obtain from the comments in those files is by no means a
list of everyone who holds copyright on them.

Some further notes the OpenStack community has assembled regarding
copyright headers in files:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/LegalIssuesFAQ#Copyright_Headers

If nothing else, hopefully this serves as another real-world data
point for copyright tracking expectations upstream and downstream in
these sorts of situations, and what sort of tracking information is
actually reasonable to expect a package maintainer or an upstream
project to be able to obtain.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley

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