Hi Bryce, Sorry, totally neglected this whilst travelling. On 17 February 2017 at 18:09, Bryce Harrington <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 05:19:55PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote: >> On 17 February 2017 at 17:12, Bryce Harrington <[email protected]> wrote: >> > It seems atypical amongst open source projects to have an exhaustive >> > (and duplicative as pointed out) listing of copyright statements. Has >> > there been an issue raised from outside the project that this listing >> > would solve? >> >> The X projects all have it, at least. > > I only spot checked, and you would know better than me, but the ones I > looked at appeared to just list key/major copyright holders (which does > seem sensible). "Vague indications of copyrights", as you mention below.
Hm, xserver I thought was at least exhaustive. >> Everyone who distributes it >> (distributions, companies building products, etc) need to have >> something that at least minimally conforms to the Mesa licensing >> document: a full statement of the license, and at least a vague >> indication of the copyrights. Depending on the legal department >> involved, they may end up compiling this exact list for their own use. > > I've done a couple such conformance checks in the past, and indeed I had > to compile such a list, so you're certainly right. But as pq showed, > it's a straightforward set of shell commands to do it. And actually, if > I were doing a conformance check, I wouldn't trust that the COPYING file > was being kept up to date so would do that scan regardless. Indeed, if > there were any descrepancies that showed up I would feel compelled to > investigate each of them. IOW rather than saving time the COPYING file > might actually create an bit of extra work for compliance checker. > Frankly, the script itself might be more valuable in this regard, so > maybe that's what should be included in the tree? > > If the ultimate goal is to help make compliance checking easier, I would > suggest focusing on fixing any irregularities in the files themselves - > e.g. continuing to ensuring dates and copyright formats are correct, > that boilerplate licensing text is consistent across files, etc., as > folks have been doing, so that running a scan is clean and reliable. > > OTOH, if the goal is about giving recognition to contributors, an > AUTHORS or CONTRIBUTORS file seems to be more conventionally used > approaches. Fair enough. FWIW, that wasn't my goal: if I was after more credit, I'd probably do it in a way which was visible to more than just distro maintainers and lawyers. :) >> I'd be fine to reduce it to the minimal license text, but that doesn't >> free us up from needing to check incoming source to make sure it >> conforms to the same license. We should really also merge data/COPYING >> into the core COPYING. > > Obviously checking licenses on incoming code is always extremely > important. :-) > > I'm not sure what you're suggesting by reducing it to the minimal > license, the file only includes one license statement so appears to be > minimal already; I'm not suggesting copyrights *shouldn't* be present, > or that any of the existing ones should be removed. AIUI it's required > to have at least one copyright statement, and seems pretty standard to > list the major copyright holders (esp. any companies/individuals with a > legal interest.) The main purpose of COPYING, though, is the licensing, > to document how the codebase can be shared and reused. > > You're probably right that merging data/COPYING and COPYING makes > sense, but I've seen enough other projects that had subdir-specific > licensing gunk that I'm not really worried about it. I'd be fine > either way. Yeah, I don't think we're big enough that having separate files makes much sense. What I'm mostly just stuck with is the copyright statements: at the moment, we list a few but don't go on to list any others. I'd suggest an incomplete statement is the worst of both worlds: should we maybe just list the applicable licenses with a 'Copyright © 2008-2017 multiple authors' and the license text, with a note to check the individual files to determine who owns copyright over which part? Cheers, Daniel _______________________________________________ wayland-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
