On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:31:02PM -0500, Rich Bowen wrote:
Anyways, it has been my experience in Open Source communities that having a copyright statement at the top of a source file can be very off-putting to people who want to contribute to that file, due to the perception that it is "owned" by someone in particular.
Out of interest I just looked at some of the source code for Ceilometer. In what I sampled, what struck me as unusual was that each file I saw listed one copyright holder and one author (an employee of the company indicated as copyright holder -- in certain cases this was done through a kind of nonstandard copyright notice [1]), followed by the boilerplate Apache License 2.0 license notice. I saw no exceptions to this - no file with two or more copyright notices, no file with more than one author noted -- bearing in mind that my sample was small. I assume this isn't in any sense reflective of how Ceilometer actually operates (i.e., it's not the case that one developer creates a file and thereafter no patch from anyone else will be accepted for that file, which would be rather bizarre for an open source project, or any software development project with more than one human involved). Of course it's very common in large-scale open source projects for source files to give an incomplete or inaccurate record of the copyright and authorship provenance of particular source files, where legal notices appear in files at all, and this tendency has probably only increased over the years/decades (the earliest open source projects did not use version control systems) and is probably unavoidable. Nevertheless, what I saw in Ceilometer supports your complaint, again assuming my sample was representative, as I could see how a newcomer to the project, especially a newcomer who had experience in other large-ish projects, could get the vague impression that individual source files were somehow 'owned' (in a broader-than-legal sense) by particular individual developers. Not sure what to suggest beyond whatever I said in the thread several months ago. Different open source projects have adopted wildly different approaches to this issue, and with certain exceptions it's hard to say that any one of the more common ones are more legally correct than the others. Maybe you could propose a specific suggestion for how OpenStack might consistently deal with this in a way that avoids the problem you believe exists? - RF [1] Of the form "Copyright Joe Developer for CompanyName, Inc."