Open Stack

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 08:48:21PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> This isn't the first time I'm calling for it. Let's hope this time, I'll
> be heard.
> 
> Randomly, contributors put their company names into source code. When
> they do, then effectively, this tells that a given source file copyright
> holder is whatever is claimed, even though someone from another company
> may have patched it.
> 
> As a result, we have a huge mess. It's impossible for me, as a package
> maintainer, to accurately set the copyright holder names in the
> debian/copyright file, which is a required by the Debian FTP masters.

I don't think OpenStack is in a different situation to the vast
majority of open source projects I've worked with or seen. Except
for those projects requiring copyright assignment to a single
entity, it is normal for source files to contain an unreliable
random splattering of Copyright notices. This hasn't seemed to
create a blocking problem for their maintenance in Debian. Loooking
at the debian/copyright files I see most of them have just done a
grep for the 'Copyright' statements & included as is - IOW just
ignored the fact that this is essentially worthless info and included
it regardless.

> I see 2 ways forward:
> 1/ Require everyone to give-up copyright holding, and give it to the
> OpenStack Foundation.
> 2/ Maintain a copyright-holder file in each project.

3/ Do nothing, just populate debian/copyright with the random
   set of 'Copyright' lines that happen to be the source files,
   as appears to be common practice across many debian packages

   eg the kernel package

    http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/l/linux/linux_3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u3_copyright

    "Copyright: 1991-2012 Linus Torvalds and many others"

   if its good enough for the Debian kernel package, it should be
   good enough for openstack packages too IMHO.


Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|