Open Stack

On Sun, 2013-04-28 at 11:04 -0400, Monty Taylor wrote:
> 
> On 04/26/2013 10:28 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 09:28:25PM -0400, Monty Taylor wrote:
> >> What if we were to generate a NOTICE file? We treat the got repo as the true source of record, and we put copyright attribution into each file. What if, same as AUTHORS and ChangeLog, we generate NOTICE at sdist time to include information collected from the individual files?
> > 
> > Sure, you could do that.  I hadn't realized that you generated AUTHORS
> > files. Since (I assume) a main purpose of having an AUTHORS file is
> > achieving some degree of author attribution, perhaps the AUTHORS file
> > should be renamed NOTICE, or copied in full into a separate file named
> > NOTICE (perhaps with additional legal information being put in the
> > NOTICE file).
> 
> We generate AUTHORS because it's a standard python dist file to have,
> but people were forgetting to add their names to it - and we realized
> that we had the information about who the authors were in git, since we
> do not accept contributions in ways that don't come from git.
> 
> So we moved to just generated it at tarball creation time - so far, this
> has worked well.
> 
> If I run a quick stupid scan of the source tree of nova:
> 
> git grep -h '# Copyright' | sed 's/United States Government as
> represented by the/NASA/' | sed 's/([Cc]) //' | sort | uniq
> 
> I get this:
> 
> # Copyright 1999-2002 by Fredrik Lundh
> # Copyright 1999-2002 by Secret Labs AB
> # Copyright 2001-2010 Twisted Matrix Laboratories.
> # Copyright 2005, the Lawrence Journal-World
> # Copyright 2006-2009 Mitch Garnaat http://garnaat.org/
> # Copyright 2006-2010 Mitch Garnaat http://garnaat.org/
> # Copyright 2009, 2010, 2011 Nicira Networks, Inc.
> # Copyright 2009 Facebook
> # Copyright 2010-2011 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2010-2011 OpenStack Foundation.
> # Copyright 2010-2012 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2010 Citrix Systems, Inc.
> # Copyright 2010 Cloud.com, Inc
> # Copyright 2010, Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.
> # Copyright 2010 NASA
> # Copyright 2010 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2011-2012 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2011 - 2012, Red Hat, Inc.
> # Copyright 2011-2013 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2011-2013 University of Southern California / ISI
> # Copyright 2011 Andrew Bogott for the Wikimedia Foundation
> # Copyright 2011 Canonical Ltd.
> # Copyright 2011 Citrix Systems, Inc.
> # Copyright 2011 Cloudscaling, Inc.
> # Copyright 2011 Denali Systems, Inc.
> # Copyright 2011 Eldar Nugaev
> # Copyright 2011 Eldar Nugaev, Kirill Shileev, Ilya Alekseyev
> # Copyright 2011 Grid Dynamics
> # Copyright 2011 Isaku Yamahata
> # Copyright 2011 Isaku Yamahata <yamahata at valinux co jp>
> # Copyright 2011 Isaku Yamahata <yamahata at valinux co jp>
> # Copyright 2011 Justin Santa Barbara
> # Copyright 2011 Ken Pepple
> # Copyright 2011 Midokura KK
> # Copyright 2011 NASA
> # Copyright 2011 Nicira, Inc
> # Copyright 2011 Nicira Networks, Inc
> # Copyright 2011 NTT
> # Copyright 2011 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2011 OpenStack Foundation.
> # Copyright 2011 OpenStack Foundation  # All Rights Reserved.
> # Copyright 2011 Piston Cloud Computing, Inc
> # Copyright 2011 Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.
> # Copyright 2011, Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.
> # Copyright 2011 Rackspace
> # Copyright 2011 Red Hat, Inc.
> # Copyright 2011 Rosetta Contributors and Canonical Ltd 2011
> # Copyright 2011 University of Southern California
> # Copyright 2011 University of Southern California / ISI
> # Copyright 2011 X.commerce, a business unit of eBay Inc.
> # Copyright 2012-2013, AT&T Labs, Yun Mao <yunmao at gmail.com>
> # Copyright 2012-2013 IBM Corp.
> # Copyright 2012-2013 Red Hat, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 Andrew Bogott for the Wikimedia Foundation
> # Copyright 2012, AT&T Labs, Yun Mao <yunmao at gmail.com>
> # Copyright 2012 Canonical Ltd
> # Copyright 2012 Citrix Systems, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 Cloudbase Solutions Srl
> # Copyright 2012 Cloudbase Solutions Srl / Pedro Navarro Perez
> # Copyright 2012 Cloudscaling
> # Copyright 2012, Cloudscaling
> # Copyright 2012 Cloudscaling Group, Inc
> # Copyright 2012 Cloudscaling Group, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 Cloudscaling, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 Grid Dynamics
> # Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
> # Copyright 2012 IBM Corp.
> # Copyright 2012 Intel Corporation.
> # Copyright 2012 Intel, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 Intel, LLC
> # Copyright 2012 Justin Santa Barbara
> # Copyright 2012 Michael Still
> # Copyright 2012 Michael Still and Canonical Inc
> # Copyright 2012 Midokura Japan K.K.
> # Copyright 2012 Nebula, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 NEC Corporation
> # Copyright 2012 Nicira Networks, Inc
> # Copyright 2012 NTT Data
> # Copyright 2012 NTT DOCOMO, INC
> # Copyright 2012 NTT DOCOMO, INC.
> # Copyright 2012 Openstack Foundation
> # Copyright 2012 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2012 OpenStack Foundation.
> # Copyright 2012, OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2012 OpenStack Foundation  # All Rights Reserved.
> # Copyright 2012 OpenStack LLC.
> # Copyright 2012 ORGANIZATION
> # Copyright 2012 Pedro Navarro Perez
> # Copyright 2012, Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 Rackspace Hosting
> # Copyright 2012 Rackspace Hosting # All Rights Reserved.
> # Copyright 2012 Red Hat, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012, Red Hat, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 SINA Corporation
> # Copyright 2012 SINA Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH
> # Copyright 2012 The Cloudscaling Group, Inc.
> # Copyright 2012 University Of Minho
> # Copyright 2012 VMware, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 Akira Yoshiyama <akirayoshiyama at gmail dot com>
> # Copyright 2013 Boris Pavlovic (boris at pavlovic.me).
> # Copyright 2013 Citrix Systems, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 Cloudbase Solutions Srl
> # Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
> # Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 IBM Corp.
> # Copyright 2013 Josh Durgin
> # Copyright 2013 Metacloud Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 Metacloud, Inc
> # Copyright 2013 Mirantis, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 Nebula, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013, Nebula, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 Netease Corporation
> # Copyright 2013 Netease, LLC.
> # Copyright 2013 Nicira, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 NTT DOCOMO, INC.
> # Copyright 2013 OpenStack Foundation
> # Copyright 2013 ORGANIZATION
> # Copyright 2013 Pedro Navarro Perez
> # Copyright 2013 Rackspace Hosting
> # Copyright 2013 Red Hat, Inc.
> # Copyright 2013 Wenhao Xu <xuwenhao2008 at gmail.com>.
> # Copyright AT&T 2012-2013 Yun Mao <yunmao at gmail.com>
> # Copyright AT&T Labs Inc. 2012 Yun Mao <yunmao at gmail.com>
> 
> With a little bit more effort, we could combine years and generate
> something that looks like a NOTICE file.
> 
> With a little bit MORE effort, we could expand that to find attributions
> that are not attached to the Apache license. OR, we could add a
> NOTICE.in file to the source tree into which we could put explicit
> reference to things that are not Apache - such as included MIT/BSD code
> - and combine that file with the output of the script to form the final
> NOTICE file.
> 
> Totally feasible to do, if it's something that people want.

I think - no matter how much we can clean it up - there's very little
value in requiring those shipping OpenStack to include an attribution
notice which credits every single copyright holder. Requiring an
attribution to the OpenStack project is probably annoying enough, but
attributing hundreds of copyright holders would be pretty ridiculous.

Cheers,
Mark.