Open Stack

On 10/19/2013 08:22 AM, Monty Taylor wrote:
>
>
> On 10/19/2013 04:52 AM, Clint Byrum wrote:
>> Excerpts from Thomas Goirand's message of 2013-10-18 23:01:50 -0700:
>>>
>>> Hi there,
>>>
>>> TroveClient just got rejected by Debian FTP masters. Reply from Luke
>>> Faraone is below.
>>>
>>> In general, I would strongly advise that a clean COPYRIGHT-HOLDER file
>>> is created with the copyright holders in them. Why? Because it is hard
>>> to distinguish between authors and copyright holders, which are very
>>> distinct things. Listing the authors in debian/copyright doesn't seem to
>>> satisfy the FTP masters as well... :(
>>>
>>> FYI, my reply was that I knew some of the authors were working for
>>> Rackspace, because I met them in Portland, and that I knew Rackspace was
>>> one of the copyright holders. Though that's of course not enough for the
>>> Debian FTP masters.
>>>
>>> Your thoughts?
>>
>> Recently there was a movement to remove the copyright headers from all
>> the files in OpenStack. Some folk disagreed with this movement, and the
>> compromise was that they were discouraged but allowed.
>
> This is not true.
>
> The compromise is that they are not required, and that people would stop
> rejecting patches if they did not include a license header.

Correction....

Would not be rejected if they did not include a *copyright* header.

License headers are still required (we even added a hacking rule for that).

> At no point in time, to my knowledge, did we EVER reach an agreement
> that they are actually discouraged. We merely acknowledged that we have
> developer apathy on this point and weren't going to get it right.

I think the lack of a firm stance here honestly caused more confusion. 
I've seen wildly different interpretations on projects because we're in 
a giant grey area (as can be seen by the different interpretations on 
this list).

Perhaps it's time to open up that giant can of worms again and try to 
get more specific on copyright requirements.... though I'm not sure the 
discussion would end up any differently.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net