Open Stack

:-( Apparently I'm not doing so great at reply-to-list these days

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Washenberger <mark.washenberger at markwash.net>
Date: Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:33 AM
Subject: Re: [openstack-tc] Copyrights and License Headers in source files
To: Mark McLoughlin <markmc at redhat.com>





On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 10:53 PM, Mark McLoughlin <markmc at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>
> On Wed, 2013-05-01 at 14:57 -0700, Mark Washenberger wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > I was looking into the ASL-2.0, and chanced across the fact that in
> Apache
> > projects, they require that source files only have the License Header,
> and
> > may not have any copyright notices [1]. It occurred to me that we waste a
> > fair amount of time on copyrights in license headers, and it would be
> nice
> > not to have to do that anymore.
>
> Like Monty said, I'd like to hear more about why these are seen as a
> time sink.
>

I'm having a difficult time providing hard numbers for you. I think one way
to check for this would be to grep gerrit review notes, but I don't know
how to do that. But in a non-exhaustive search, I can see some examples

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/27001/ -> headers were missing from empty
files, caught in review (eventually)
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/23044/ -> copyright had wrong year (caught
in review)
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/22742/ -> just my fault, but I
misunderstood the copyright policy and got someone to change to "Openstack
Foundation" from their company
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/20927/ -> wrong year (caught in review)
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/20926/ -> wrong year (caught in review)
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/20925/ -> wrong year (caught in review)
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/20914 -> should be "Foundation" not "LLC",
not caught in review
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/21130 -> s/LLC/Foundation/ not caught in
review

I found these by manually inspecting only the latest 13 results I got when
I searched for commits in glance that add files.

>From this data, I think its clear that coders are making mistakes about
licensing/copyright headers, and reviewers are having to pause to think
about the correctness of those headers.

While the amount of effort here isn't necessarily very large, I'd like to
draw your attention to the amount of effort that it probably should be: 0.
In proportional terms, we're pretty far away from ideal :-)


>
> > I also noticed a previous conversation [2] on this subject. I have not
> > found any policy that actually requires us to include copyrights with
> each
> > source file license header.
> >
> > Feel free to suggest that this is more trouble than it is worth, but I'd
> > like to propose that we discourage new contributions from including
> > copyright attribution, and provide a process to work with the various
> > parties we have to remove the copyrights from existing files.
>
> I don't have a massively strong opinion on this and I'd never really
> considered the possibility of not having copyright headers, but my first
> thought is that I like that we have them. I like that "ownership" of the
> work is distributed and it's nice to be able to see how that ownership
> is distributed through the code base.
>

I'd never considered it either, until I found out that Apache Software
Foundation projects are explicitly required to *not* put copyright headers
in their source files (they do, however, retain license headers). I realize
that rule doesn't apply to us, but if it's good enough for ASF, how are we
different?

I'd also contend that the view of ownership you get from looking at
copyright headers is pretty inaccurate. For example (again from Glance),

$ git grep -i rackspace | grep -i copyright | wc -l
       0




>
> In any case, I think it's too late for us to effectively make a change
> in like this successfully and not worth the hassle.
>

I would agree if I thought that such a change required  any of the
following:
 1) changing existing copyright headers
 2) changing the CLA
 3) changing bylaws

But I don't think those are needed. If we simply said "stop adding
copyright headers", then I believe I could write a flake8 hacking rule to
check for correct license headers (sans copyright) on new files. That would
be enough for me, because my goal here is for people to not have to think
about such headers during future development and review.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/legal-discuss/attachments/20130502/fcd9055e/attachment.html>