Open Stack

On 02/17/2015 07:58 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 01:16:46PM +0100, Christian Berendt wrote:
>> On 02/17/2015 12:05 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>>> In section 4.(c) the LICENSE text says
>>>
>>>       (c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works
>>>           that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and
>>>           attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,
>>>           excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of
>>>           the Derivative Works; and
>>>
>>> So based on that, I think it would be a violation to remove any of the
>>> "Copyright <acmeco>" lines in the file header.
>>
>> Section 4 is about the redistribution of the code. In my understanding
>> this means that I am not allowed to remove the license header if I
>> redistribute a source file (e.g. in a package or in my own software).
> 
> The OpenStack project and/or many of our participating contributors
> and users, are all considered to be distributing the source code,
> so this section applies IMHO.
> 
>> If I add code to OpenStack I have to sign the CLA. The CLA includes:
>>
>>    2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
>>       this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
>>       worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
>>       copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of,
>>       publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the
>>       Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.
>>
>> Does this not mean that it is not necessary to explicitly add a
>> copyright statement above the license headers?
> 
> Whether the copyright statements are required or not in the first place,
> is tangential to whether you are legally permitted to remove any which
> already exist.
> 
>> According to
>> http://www.apache.org/dev/apply-license.html#contributor-copyright and
>> http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html copyright statements should
>> not be added to the headers in source files.
> 
> That is outlining the Apache project's chosen policy. It is reasonable
> for them to define a policy that copyright statements not be added to
> source file headers. Note, however, that it says the copyright holder
> (or someone who has been granted permission to act on their behalf) is
> the party who is responsible for removing them. They are not saying
> that you can just remove copyright notices that were added by someone
> else.

This is a very important point. That is what the Apache project has
chosen to do. It is not what we've chosen to do.

I recommend reading this:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/LegalIssuesFAQ#Copyright_Headers

But also, what Daniel says is right - while it may or may not be
necessary to put the headers in the files (and reasonable people
disagree on this point) removing ones that are there is an action almost
guaranteed to provoke a bunch of anger.