On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 08:35:43PM +0200, Mohamed Atef wrote: > Can OMPD be under our university Copyright? > The project is a university project.
When you use DCO, your contribution will be under the copyright of whomever owns the copyright to it (you or your university etc.), but we really don't want to list on every file a Copyright line for whomever touched that file. The FSF Copyright lines are there in most of the files because those files were added by people with Copyright assignment to FSF, but the alternative to that is really Copyright The GNU Toolchain Authors. (without year), which just says that the file is copyrighted and isn't something that needs to be updated every second day somebody touches the file and changes something in it. There is quite significant cost in accepting any other Copyright line form, we have a script to bump the FSF Copyright years and it gives up on any unknown copyright lines. We've made some exceptions for files that have been copied from other projects and where those files already had some copyright lines in some cases, but we really don't want to do that for files which are hosted only in GCC and don't come from other projects. See contrib/update-copyright.py. We will need to add hopefully just a single line next year for the 'The GNU Toolchain Authors.' or perhaps 2-3 if there are variant spellings of that, but if every contributor under DCO asks for his copyright lines, it would be a nightmare. Furthermore, usually people don't update copyright lines when touching existing files, so if the file contained your or your university copyright line and no other and somebody else changes the file, it wouldn't reflect correctly the copyright state. See e.g. https://gcc.gnu.org/r12-6635 for an example of such a file which has been added under DCO, even when it is Jonathan or Red Hat (who exactly owns copyright is extremely country and contract specific) who actually owns the copyright. Jakub
