Gabriel Hurley wrote:
That just sounds like debt to me, and that kind of cruft I don't think reflects well on the project, as then the copyright notices would be completely inaccurate (not just mostly inaccurate). Let's make a decision and do it (either ensure copyright notices are coming in appropriately, or get rid of them).
Making them completely accurate is an impossible task. The best you can get out of humans is the "sort-of-accurate" state that we maintain now. Is that really of sufficient value to spend the cycles paying attention to them?
Honestly, generating these patches to remove them can be nearly automated, and over the course of a week or two could all be moved through. Then we can lock it down with a hacking rule, and never have to deal with it again.
Yep, the patchsets would be *large*, but trivial to produce, trivial to review, and harmless to the code.
Sounds like a nice way to get to the top spot in contributors lists :) I agree there is value in cleaning it all up, and that the patch itself can be neatly automated... But gathering the necessary permissions from all copyright holders (which include a lot of companies) sounds like a non-trivial task, especially for larger projects. And if we don't do it completely, I'd rather not do it at all. So the options are: 1- not do anything 2- prevent new copyright notices 3- prevent new copyright notices and clean up old ones and personally I'm with Sean, I think it should be either (1) or (3) for consistency reasons. I think this is no longer a legal question (we established that they are not necessary), but a project consistency/cleanup effort discussion... so we should move it to openstack-dev, and discuss the three options on the table with all the devs. Markwash: would you introduce the topic there ? -- Thierry Carrez (ttx)