Open Stack

Either 1 or 3.
2 does not solve anything.

-----Original Message-----
From: Monty Taylor [mailto:mordred at inaugust.com]
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2016 10:01 AM
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all] Proposal: copyright-holders file in each project, or copyright holding forced to the OpenStack Foundation

On 01/15/2016 10:38 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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.

Agree. debian/copyright should be a best effort - but it can only be as good as the input data available to the packager. Try getting an accurate debian/copyright file for the MySQL source tree at some point.
(and good luck)

>> 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.

I vote for 3


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