Open Stack

On 10/19/2013 08:29 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
> 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.

I think it might be time to open it up again - and seems like a good
test of our new TC's ability to have a discussion on a potentially hairy
topic. The fact that it might be causing a demonstrable issue with the
distros might be a good data point that did not exist last time.

However, even as a strong supporter of accurate license headers, I would
like to know more about the FTP masters issue. I dialog with them, as
folks who deal with this issue and its repercutions WAY more than any of
us might be really nice.

Monty