Open Stack

On Sat, 2013-10-19 at 08:24 -0400, Monty Taylor wrote:
> 
> On 10/19/2013 05:49 AM, Michael Still wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> I suggest that we just put Copyright headers back in the source files.
> >> That will make Debian's licensecheck work fairly automatically. A single
> >> file that tries to do exactly what debian/copyright would do seems a bit
> >> odd.
> >
> > The problem here is that the copyright headers were wrong. They aren't
> > religiously added to, and sometimes people have tried to "gift" code
> > to the Foundation by saying the code is copyright the Foundation,
> > which isn't always true. So, we can't lean on these headers for
> > accurate statements of copyright.
> 
> This is correct. As with many things that are harder for us than for
> other people, we have >=1000 developers and the history thus-far has
> been for people to be rather antagonistic and annoyed when someone tries
> to suggest proper copyright attribution.
> 
> What we CAN say is that every single commit is Apache licensed. Our CLA
> and enforcement of it, sad as this statement makes me, ensures that we
> know that.

Right. We work hard to ensure that all copyright holders license their
contribution under the Apache License. A CLA isn't the only way of doing
this, but it's what we do now.

> I'm not sure what to do re: FTP masters. Could someone expand for me
> like I'm an idiot what the goal they are trying to achieve is? I _think_
> that they're trying to make sure that the code is free software and that
> it is annotated somewhere that we know this to be true, yeah? Is there
> an additional thing being attempted?

In other words, what exactly is a list of copyright holders good for? It
doesn't affect the license and there's no requirement under the Apache
License for Debian to credit the copyright holders.

It would be really silly of us to burden ourselves with maintaining
lists of copyright holders if no-one can explain how it helps anything.

Mark.