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Re: Why do we list individual copyright holders?



On 12/19/2017 05:33 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> 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.

Considering this thread, it's easy to understand: a list of copyright
holders, so one wont spend hours writing such a list in
debian/copyright, which is built only based on the assumptions that all
copyright holders claiming to be one have at least written their names
in upstream source code files. But it looks like the issue is deeper
than this, and is probably a Debian problem, not an upstream OpenStack,
so I don't dare to ask again. I'm totally on your side with what you
wrote below (ie: the Apache license doesn't require listing copyright
holders).

> 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.

The issue is: Debian FTP masters do not agree with these "comments from
legal counsel". Or rather, they just reject packages, saying that this
or that copyright holder isn't listed in debian/copyright. I also
strongly feel like it's pointless, but this happened to me *many* times.
Since we get no explanation, or anyone from the FTP master team entering
this thread, it's pointless to even discuss this here, unfortunately... :(

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)


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