Open Stack

On 01/21/2014 03:11 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:41:59AM -0800, Luis Villa wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>     If the license notice remains in the file, this mitigates the concern
>>     that having no legal information in a source file could lead to one of
>>     two bad future events if a source file ends up being indirectly taken
>>     out of context by some other project: either the project is too afraid
>>     to use the code because of unclear licensing, or the project will
>>     assume it's 'public domain' with no conditions attached.
>>
>> Note that this is not a hypothetical problem for many downstream consumers; it
>> turns out that when you tell people "I want you to use my code" they do that,
>> and then other people do further downstream, and then when they want to comply
>> with your license they get very confused :)
> 
> Yes, I have been on both sides of this. :)
> 
>> I wrote about this somewhat at length a few years ago:
>>
>> http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/03/17/
>> on-the-importance-of-per-file-license-information/
>>
>> So if I understand Richard correctly, I think his suggested approach is right:
>> per-file *license* information, but not per-file information about copyright
>> holders/authors (except perhaps a generic "copyright by the contributors"
>> statement).
> 
> It's at least an option to consider among various others. 

For what it's worth, we are actually enforcing the inclusion of license
headers in our test automation systems.
https://github.com/openstack-dev/hacking/blob/master/hacking/core.py#L186

So all projects that use Hacking get enforcement of this automatically.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
Samsung Research America
sean at dague.net / sean.dague at samsung.com
http://dague.net

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