Open Stack

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)