Open Stack

On 2013-10-20 20:57:56 +0800 (+0800), Thomas Goirand wrote:
> Well, good luck finding all the copyright holders for such a large and
> old project. It's not really practical in this case, unfortunately.

To a great extent, the same goes for projects a quarter the size and
age of the Linux kernel--doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix that
though. In our case, we at least have names and (possibly stale)
contact information for all the people who claim to have authored
contributions, so I suspect we're in a somewhat better position to
do something about it.

Part of the issue is that historically the project has held a
laissez faire position that claiming copyright on contributions is
voluntary, and that if you don't feel your modifications to a
particular file are worthy of copyright (due to triviality or
whatever) then there was no need to update a copyright statement for
new holders or years. So the assumption there was that copyrights
which an author wanted to assert were claimed in the files they
touched, and if they didn't update the copyright statement on a
change that was their prerogative.

I think we collectively know that this isn't really how copyright
works in most Berne Convention countries, but I also don't think
reviewers would object to any copyright holder adding a separate
commit to update valid copyright claims on a particular file which
they previously neglected to document.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley