On 04/28/2013 06:04 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
On 2013-04-25 21:27:20 -0400 (-0400), Richard Fontana wrote: [...]
I see occasional uses of "Copyright OpenStack Foundation" in source files and I am not clear on whether this signifies code that was originally copyrighted by OpenStack LLC or, instead, some sort of attempt (like the deprecated ASF practice) to provide attribution to the OpenStack Foundation regardless of whether it is actually in any interesting sense a copyright holder.
It is also not clear to me that it is *proper* to give attribution to the OpenStack *Foundation*, but that's a project-specific cultural question and I don't have good insight into that.
In the case of code contribution from those of us who are directly employed by the OpenStack Foundation, it seems entirely appropriate (at least to me, though IANAL). I'm curious whether you have an alternative suggestion.
If you are employed by the Foundation, then I would say you should certainly give attribution unless the Foundation has an exempting clause in your employment contract. (FWIW, I would vote in favor of not having Foundation employees assign their copyright to the Foundation, since I do know believe our intent is to grow the amount of lines of code under its copyright. That said- I don't really care, so if you're ok with it, I'm ok with it.) As for all of the other instances (pretty much every instance that is not a result of jeblair or fungi writing code over the last few months) it seems to me that they are all mistaken attribution by people who were never given adequate instructions as to what to do. A decent amount of them are likely from Rackspace employees told to put Copyright OpenStack LLC in there. This in turn caused cargo-culting by other people who had not in any legal way assigned their copyright to the Openstack LLC or the Foundation (since we don't do copyright assignment) That said - I'm not sure what, if anything, it damages. And I'm fairly certain the cost of fixing it would be MASSIVE. Or?