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Re: Why do we list individual copyright holders?



On 2017-12-23 11:53:38 +0800 (+0800), Paul Wise wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 23, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> 
> > (ie: the Apache license doesn't require listing copyright holders).
> 
> IANAL, but it seems pretty clear to me that this is not the case, at
> least for source packages (see 4.c), for binary packages we also have
> to distribute any associated NOTICE files (see 4.d, but I guess we
> violate this rule quite a lot), which I would guess usually contain
> copyright information.
> 
> https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

It doesn't require all holders of copyright to declare they hold a
copyright:

[from 4.d second ¶] "You may add Your own copyright statement to
Your modifications..."

Every patch is a modification being distributed, and the license
states that you _may_ add your own copyright statement to the
existing statements (if there are any), but does not say that you
are _obligated_ to add your own to the existing copyright
statements.

Scraping a list of copyright holders who have chosen to note their
copyright in at least one file is fairly easy to enable upstream by
standardizing the format of copyright notices in files and a smidge
of CI to reject additions which look like malformed copyright lines.
However we're not going to require that someone add new copyright
lines, because the license itself does not require that. As a
result, the best we can do is reproduce a list of all copyright
statements present in the files, but we cannot produce a list of all
copyright holders because we have no way to know about copyright
holders who have not added copyright statements.

(perhaps this is a nuanced distinction, but listing all copyright
statements is not the same thing as listing all copyright holders)
-- 
Jeremy Stanley

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