Open Stack

Hi Folks,

In a recent thread in the openstack legal-discuss mailing list [1], we
determined that copyright headers in source files are not legally necessary
to preserve the original copyright. In addition, copyright headers in
OpenStack projects right now are kind of a mess, resulting in confusing,
inaccurate, and at times unwanted copyright assignments.

My main interest in starting this conversation is for developers and
reviewers to no longer have to spend any time maintaining or otherwise
concerning themselves with copyright headers. To that end, I offer the
following proposals for cultural and procedural changes.

CULTURAL: Let's encourage our fellow contributors to stop adding copyright
headers to new files, mostly by example, but possibly also by a few gentle
-1s during review. If a contributor insists that their employer's legal
counsel won't allow them to submit code without a copyright notice, suggest
that they instead put it in a per-project NOTICE file (after suggesting
they consider hiring a different lawyer :-) Note, no consensus is required
for individuals to just stop adding their own headers!

PROCEDURAL (two independent parts):
A) Start gradually removing existing copyright headers as time and
permission from the copyright holder allows. This is a 90/10 problem; we
can make a huge amount of progress by talking first to the OpenStack
Foundation, then to a handful of other companies. But past that, progress
will be slow and probably not worth the effort. [2]
B) Add a hacking check to prevent new copyright headers from being added.
In order to accomodate any existing copyright headers not already cleaned
up, we probably have to add some sort of pylint-like "disable" comments to
short-circuit the hacking check.

So, what do you think? Is this a bad idea? If so, why do you hate me? Did
copyright headers once save your kitty from a burning building? Are you
worried about consistency? If so, please explain why you believe
consistency is useful in this specific case to avoid a choice Emerson quote.

Curmudgeonly,
markwash


[1] -
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/legal-discuss/2013-May/thread.html
[2] - Try this tortured one-liner to see the distribution of copyrights in
your favorite project. Some projects are going to be easier to clean up
than others.

git grep -i copyright | perl -pe 's/copyright//i' | sed 's/.*:#//' | sed
's/([cC])//' | sed 's/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\(-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)*,*//' |
sed 's/^ *//' | sed 's/[. ]*$//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr | head -20
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