Open Stack

Excerpts from Thomas Goirand's message of 2013-10-18 23:01:50 -0700:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> TroveClient just got rejected by Debian FTP masters. Reply from Luke
> Faraone is below.
> 
> In general, I would strongly advise that a clean COPYRIGHT-HOLDER file
> is created with the copyright holders in them. Why? Because it is hard
> to distinguish between authors and copyright holders, which are very
> distinct things. Listing the authors in debian/copyright doesn't seem to
> satisfy the FTP masters as well... :(
> 
> FYI, my reply was that I knew some of the authors were working for
> Rackspace, because I met them in Portland, and that I knew Rackspace was
> one of the copyright holders. Though that's of course not enough for the
> Debian FTP masters.
> 
> Your thoughts?

Recently there was a movement to remove the copyright headers from all
the files in OpenStack. Some folk disagreed with this movement, and the
compromise was that they were discouraged but allowed.

Nobody who writes code wants to hear that they have to think about
licensing, copyrights, etc. But at a bare minimum, copyrights should be
asserted somewhere in each project's repository.

Now, some people will say "thats what we have git for". I suggest to
those who would suggest we just trust git commit logs that this is
not sufficient. For instance, I submit code with my personal email
address, even though it is all work-for-hire and thus sending copyrights
to HP rather than me individually.

I suggest that we just put Copyright headers back in the source files.
That will make Debian's licensecheck work fairly automatically. A single
file that tries to do exactly what debian/copyright would do seems a bit
odd.

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Thomas Goirand (zigo)
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [Openstack-devel] python-troveclient_0.1.4-1_amd64.changes REJECTED
> Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 04:00:19 +0000
> From: Luke Faraone <ftpmaster at ftp-master.debian.org>
> To: PKG OpenStack <openstack-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org>, Thomas
> Goirand <zigo at debian.org>
> 
> 
> Dear maintainer,
> 
> debian/copyright is **not** an AUTHORS list. This package appears to be
> Copyright (c) 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P., and some
> other
> companies, not copyrighted each individual employee at HP who worked on it.
> 
> Your automated debian/copyright generation is most probably suboptimal for
> most packages, and is most certainly not a substitute for manual review.
> One
> missed copyright holder:
> 
> python-troveclient-0.1.4\troveclient\base.py:
>     Copyright 2010 Jacob Kaplan-Moss
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Luke Faraone
> FTP Team
> 
> 
> ===
> 
> Please feel free to respond to this email if you don't understand why
> your files were rejected, or if you upload new files which address our
> concerns.
>