Open Stack

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 01:04:08AM +0000, 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).

There are two distinct issues here, notice of copyright ownership and
notice of attribution. 

It is understood that the person or entity named in a copyright notice
is the copyright holder. So if an employee of the OpenStack Foundation
contributes code to OpenStack and the Foundation holds copyright on
such contributions, certainly any copyright notice associated with
those contributions should identify the Foundation. In that first
paragraph you quoted from my message, I was mistakenly ignoring that
possibility (something I realized after posting the message).

The question of whether to use the NOTICE file mechanism mentioned in
the Apache License 2.0 raises the second issue, that of attribution
notices. The issue here is more specifically whether you'd want to use
a NOTICE file to give attribution to something other than that list of
people in AUTHORS, analogous to what is done by the ASF (giving
NOTICE-file attribution to the ASF itself). That is what I meant in
the second paragraph that you quoted, where I said I wasn't sure it
was "proper".

I don't mean it's not *legally* proper. I mean that my intuition was
what Mark later expressed when he said that an ASF-style attribution
to the OpenStack Foundation (alone out of all individuals and
organizations associated with contributing to OpenStack) would not
ring true. (I suppose you could use a different wording of attribution
singling out the OpenStack Foundation in a way that might 'ring
true'.)

> I'm curious whether you have an alternative suggestion.

Just to be clear, I don't think there is any reason to use the NOTICE
file mechanism to provide attribution to some *single* thing (vs.,
say, the list of individual authors generated in the AUTHORS file),
and clearly up to this point no one has either thought about it or
considered it important to use the NOTICE file at all. But if that
were considered desirable, then I'd suggest that the single thing
should be the OpenStack project, not the OpenStack Foundation. That is
not a legal opinion or conclusion, it is the result of my intuition
about the distinction between OpenStack (the project) and the
OpenStack Foundation.

- RF