Open Stack

On 20 October 2013 04:50, Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:

> Well, this is still a fuzzy topic. We have a lot of contributions
> and know who the authors are, but not necessarily who the copyright

s/authors/submitters/. I've heard (though I lack direct evidence) that
some teams funnel their patches through a single submitter [so you
have an influential visible submitter], but the actual author isn't
known :).

So we know a claimed author. I'm not even sure that gerrit cross
references ssh keys and committers - but I expect folk would notice a
totally new patch from someone other than who gerrit says pushed the
code.

> signed agreements to this effect). It would almost certainly take a
> policy decision by the technical committee if we wanted to start
> requiring all authors of new changes to add/update copyright
> statements accurately on every file they touch, and there is quite
> probably no chance at all we can precisely nail down historical
> copyright holder data for previous changes already merged.

I think updating a static registry on every patch is a very high cost
to pay. OTOH registering one's nominated copyright holder on the first
patch to a repository is probably a sustainable overhead. And it's
probably amenable to automation - a commit hook could do it locally
and a check job can assert that it's done.

-Rob


-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud