Need for "All rights reserved" in source files ?
In the Nova codebase (and presumably other openstack projects) there is often a statement "All rights reserved" placed on the same line as, or line immediately following, a company's "Copyright" statement. This is not at all consistently applied, eg in Nova, 704 files have 'All rights reserved' but 539 files do not have it: $ git grep --files-with-matches -i 'All rights reserved' -- '*.py' | wc -l 704 $ git grep --files-without-match -i 'All rights reserved' -- '*.py' | wc -l 539 When there are multiple 'Copyright XYZ Corp' lines in the source file header, it isn't entirely clear to whose copyright declaration the 'All rights reserved' statement applies - the one before, the one after, all coyright declarations, or something else... Is there any current legal reason why 'All rights reserved' is needed in source files ? I'm been under the impression this statement is obsolete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescence Is saying "All rights reserved" even relevant when we have placed the file under the Apache license ? The combo of the 'Copyright XYZ Corp' and the Apache license header should be sufficient to express the copyright status of any source file surely. So I'm wondering if there is any legal reason that prevents us removing the 'All rights reserved' statements from the source files in Nova, and any projects who wish to do a similar cleanup ? Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 01:47:58PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
Is there any current legal reason why 'All rights reserved' is needed in source files ?
None that I can see.
So I'm wondering if there is any legal reason that prevents us removing the 'All rights reserved' statements from the source files in Nova, and any projects who wish to do a similar cleanup ?
tl;dr IMO you should keep the 'All rights reserved' unless the nominal copyright holders in the associated legal notice authorize the removal. If the code with which such notices are associated were licensed by the nominal copyright holder under the Apache License 2.0, section 4c of the Apache License 2.0 would suggest that the license requires retention of the full legal notice, as it says: You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works I would assume the "All rights reserved", however pointless, to be part of the copyright notice for purposes of this provision. That raises the question of what entity or entities are actually granting the Apache License. This has been a point of confusion. See https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStackAndItsCLA#Duplicative_Licensing for some discussion of one aspect of this. In any case, direct Apache License grants from non-OpenStack-Foundation entities must be occurring where there are cracks in the CLA system, and it's *possible* that in a subset of these cases you have copyright notices with "All rights reserved" associated with the material covered by those license grants. I only raise this point because I can't say that the mere existence of the CLA system itself provides a basis for the removal of all the 'All rights reserved' statements any more than it authorizes the removal of the main copyright notices. In a more typical CLA system you wouldn't have copyright notices from contributors other than the OpenStack Foundation itself. There are also OpenStack Foundation copyright notices in source code with "All rights reserved" appended. Here's a possible example, though it's a case where you have more than one nominal copyright holder: https://github.com/openstack/python-keystoneclient/blob/master/keystoneclien... In this sort of case it's even clearer to me that the 'All rights reserved' has to be retained unless the OpenStack Foundation instructs otherwise, since clearly the OpenStack Foundation is granting licenses under the Apache License. (It's been noted that some OpenStack Foundation copyright notices appear to have been included in error. See: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/LegalIssuesFAQ#Copyright_Headers ) There appear to be some Red Hat copyright notices with 'All rights reserved' in OpenStack source files. Red Hat developers: don't use 'All rights reserved'. :) These can be deleted if there is no other named copyright holder. - RF
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 10:06:56AM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 01:47:58PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
Is there any current legal reason why 'All rights reserved' is needed in source files ?
None that I can see.
So I'm wondering if there is any legal reason that prevents us removing the 'All rights reserved' statements from the source files in Nova, and any projects who wish to do a similar cleanup ?
tl;dr IMO you should keep the 'All rights reserved' unless the nominal copyright holders in the associated legal notice authorize the removal.
[snip] Thanks for the detailed explanation. The need to get authorization from the nominal copyright holders means that it really wouldn't be worth the effort to remove 'All rights reserved' just for the sake of cleaning up the headers. Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|
participants (2)
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Daniel P. Berrange
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Richard Fontana