Open Stack

I'm generally +1 on this, however it's going to be hard to get 
organizations to agree to this while other orgs are listed in the source 
files. From an IBM perspective, I've gotten agreement that we're cool 
with this, as long as it's consistent. A patch work where some 
copyrights are still listed, but others aren't allowed in, isn't going 
to fly.

My suggestion, is that we declare a flag day (like June 15), and that 
someone needs to make an objection by then, otherwise this is new 
policy. We create a new hacking rule that projects can use to enforce it.

Then we have a couple of volunteers lined up to generate, and review 
through mass removals from the code for each openstack/ project, plus 
flipping on the hacking rule.

	-Sean

On 05/17/2013 04:00 AM, Mark Washenberger wrote:
> 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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>


-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net