Open Stack

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com>wrote:

> On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 08:56:03AM -0700, Mark Washenberger wrote:
> >
> >
> >     This is really an education issue. Lots of first time Open Source
> folks on
> >     the project that don't understand that copyright + license grant in
> each
> >     file is actually quite important to ensure things are actually Open
> Source
> >     in all jurisdictions.
> >
> >
> > This seems to be the detail I was missing. Can someone elaborate a bit
> about
> > where this is a problem?
>
> While I can't speak of 'all jurisdictions', just as a matter of common
> practice in open source projects this is not so, and I'm not sure what
> the notice 'ensures'. There is no particular *need* to have a
> copyright notice and license grant in each file; if that were so then
> probably half or more of all open source projects, including, no
> doubt, OpenStack dependencies, would fail the test. There are some
> arguments in favor of having such notices in each file, but there are
> also arguments against (well, particularly with respect to copyright
> notices, as over time they tend to become misleading as indications of
> the actual provenance of the file in question).
>
> Aaron Williamson wrote a good article on this topic, though I don't
> agree with all of his recommendations:
> http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html


Thanks so much for this link. This page looks like a much better informed
way of expressing my viewpoint, which boils down to
 1) Copyright headers in source files are not really necessary, and often
give an inaccurate view of the provenance of a file.
 2) Some folks, like me, find copyright headers in source files tedious to
maintain.

Unless anyone has a stronger counterpoint to the view Richard has expressed
here, I'd like to proceed with plans to stop allowing commits that add new
copyright headers to new file additions in Glance (LICENSE file is an
obvious exception).

- a hacking check that prohibits copyright headers, with exceptions made
for all currently existing files
- some sort of commit hook or automated process for setting up the static
license header in files that are missing the license notice
- seek permission from the OpenStack Foundation to move their copyright
headers into LICENSE (or remove them entirely)
- seek similar permission from other original copyright holders

(these last two steps really aren't that crucial, since the goal from my
perspective is for folks to stop having to pay attention to copyright
headers while coding)
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