Bug#737559: copyright-format: author != copyright, add an author field?
On 03/02/14 21:58, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au> writes:
>
>> There are cases where I would have used it and I believe that
>> recognising people's work (even if they have assigned their rights) is
>> an important way of showing our thanks and acknowledgment to those who
>> develop free software, and having a dedicated field makes them stand out
>> just that little bit more.
>
> I'm all in favor of recognizing people's work.
>
> I'm dubious that the *copyright* file is the right place to do that, for
> precisely the reason that you point out about why the Copyright field is
> the wrong place to do that.
>
> The copyright file in our packages is primarily a legal artifact, with
> some other stuff mixed in. It's not a model of purity of purpose at the
> moment (see "other stuff mixed in"), but I'm not sure that evolving it
> further in the direction of being a catch-all metadata file about the
> upstream code is a good idea.
>
> In other words, I think the author information might fit better into
> DEP-12 than in copyright-format.
>
I agree that author/contributor info is not always relevant from a legal
perspective
On the other hand
- it is the type of data that a maintainer will come across as they
prepare the copyright file anyway
- there are examples for using legal documents to acknowledge/credit
people (e.g. the US regularly names laws after people)
- sometimes the license text itself refers to both copyright holders AND
contributors, e.g. I'm sure you are familiar with clauses like:
"4. Neither the name of the <organization> nor the
names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written permission."
"The views and conclusions contained in the software and documentation
are those
of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official
policies,
either expressed or implied, of the FreeBSD Project."
These don't require us to name the authors/contributors, but as those
people are referred to in the license text, their names are not
completely irrelevant either.
Obviously, I can get by just inserting names in the comments, I don't
see any urgency to change the policy on this in the blink of an eye, but
I hope it is useful feedback for the copyright policy and other related
documents when they do come up for discussion again.
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