Open Stack

On Fri, 2016-01-15 at 15:38 +0000, 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.
> 
> > 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/lin
> ux_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.

This is what I'd vote for.  It seems to be enough to satisfy the debian
policy on copyrights and it means nothing has to change in Openstack.

James