Open Stack

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rich Bowen" <rbowen at redhat.com>
> To: "Colin McNamara" <colin at 2cups.com>
> Cc: openstack-docs at lists.openstack.org
> Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 12:40:31 PM
> Subject: Re: [Openstack-docs] Copyright statements in docs source files
> 
> 
> On 01/14/2014 12:29 PM, Colin McNamara wrote:
> > I am not a lawyer, but the law as I understand it is -
> >
> > Copyright is held by the author and or the company that that author is
> > working for under a work for hire agreement. The code that is
> > contributed is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
> >
> > The original contributor does retain Copyright, which does provide for
> > legal protections for Corporate contributors, as well as aligning into
> > retained Patents on inventions implemented through code contributed
> > (and licensed) to OpenStack.
> 
> Yes, that much is true. But this happens without a copyright statement
> in the source file. There are a number of reasons for not having
> copyright statements in the code:
> 
> * If I edit a file and it says at the top that the file is copyright
> BigCo, I am discouraged from editing that file, because of the
> implication that I'm treading on someone else's toes. Files should not
> have any indication that they are "owned" by any one person or company.
> This actively discourages people jumping in a fixing stuff.
> 
> * If N people contribute to a file, are we supposed to have N copyright
> statements in the file? This doesn't scale over time.
> 
> * Having author names in a file encourages people to contribute for the
> wrong reasons.
> 
> * Git keeps track of who contributed what changes. It's not necessary to
> have explicit copyright statements.
> 
> Copyright statements to individuals or companies in source files seems
> very anti-community to me. Perhaps this is years of Apache
> indoctrination speaking - we had this argument ten years ago at the ASF,
> and author names in source files were strongly discouraged at that time,
> due to all of the reasons listed above. I consider the first one the
> most compelling. Anything that we can do to encourage beginners to jump
> in and start working, we should. Having a (implied) "this file is owned
> by BigCo Inc" statement at the top of a file works actively against that.

All of which is good gear...but, current guidance [1][2] is as follows:

"If you update a page, you can add the entity you represent (self or
organization) to the list of Copyright holders, but do not remove any
listed Copyright headings. If the content has been substantially updated in
2013, add the year to the change. If no substantive updates or revisions
have been made to the copyrighted material, the year does not need to be
updated."

If you feel strongly about changing the status quo (which is that adding such attributions is OK coupled with an implied understanding that we wont actively remove them) then I would suggest taking it to legal-discuss where it has been discussed...enthusiastically...in the past [3].

-Steve

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Documentation/Copyright
[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/LegalIssuesFAQ
[3] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/legal-discuss/2013-May/thread.html#22