Open Stack

On 21/10/13 19:45, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 10/20/2013 09:00 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
>> On 2013-10-20 22:20:25 +1300 (+1300), Robert Collins wrote:
>> [...]
>>> OTOH registering one's nominated copyright holder on the first
>>> patch to a repository is probably a sustainable overhead. And it's
>>> probably amenable to automation - a commit hook could do it locally
>>> and a check job can assert that it's done.
>>
>> I know the Foundation's got work underway to improve the affiliate
>> map from the member database, so it might be possible to have some
>> sort of automated job which proposes changes to a copyright holders
>> list in each project by running a query with the author and date of
>> each commit looking for new affiliations. That seems like it would
>> be hacky, fragile and inaccurate, but probably still more reliable
>> than expecting thousands of contributors to keep that information up
>> to date when submitting patches?
>
> My request wasn't to go *THAT* far. The main problem I was facing was
> that troveclient has a few files stating that HP was the sole copyright
> holder, when it clearly was not (since I have discussed a bit with some
> the dev team in Portland, IIRC some of them are from Rackspace...).
>
> Just writing HP as copyright holder to please the FTP masters because it
> would match some of the source content, then seemed wrong to me, which
> is why I raised the topic. Also, they didn't like that I list the
> authors (from a "git log" output) in the copyright files.

Can't we just write "Copyright OpenStack Contributors"? (Where 
'contributors' means individuals or organisations who have signed the 
CLA.) As others have pointed out, this is how other large projects 
handle it.

It's not that knowing the copyright holders isn't important - it *is* 
important because the licence is meaningless unless granted/permitted by 
the actual copyright holders. But the actual individual names are 
irrelevant to Debian. Gerrit ensures that only OpenStack Contributors 
(those that have signed the CLA) can contribute to OpenStack, and 
contributors declare via the CLA that they have the legal right to 
licence the code (which is the best that you can do here). The paper 
trail is complete, everybody should be happy.

> So, for me, the clean and easy way to fix this problem is to have a
> simple copyright-holder.txt file, containing a list of company or
> individuals. It doesn't really mater if some entities forget to write
> themselves in. After all, that'd be their fault, no? The point is, at
> least I'd have an upstream source file to show to the FTP masters as
> something which has a chance to be a bit more accurate than
> second-guessing through "git log" or reading a few source code files
> which represent a wrong view of the reality.

This seems like an orthogonal question, but if we're going to relitigate 
it then I remain +1 on maintaining it in one file per project as you 
suggest, and -10 on trying to maintain it in every single source file. 
Not because that would be inaccurate - though clearly it would be worse 
than useless in terms of accuracy - but because it would add a whole 
layer of overhead that's as annoying as it is pointless.

cheers,
Zane.

>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Thomas Goirand (zigo)
>
> P.S: I asked the FTP masters to write in this thread, though it seems
> nobody had time to do so...