Open Stack

On 01/14/2014 12:29 PM, Colin McNamara wrote:
> I am not a lawyer, but the law as I understand it is -
>
> Copyright is held by the author and or the company that that author is 
> working for under a work for hire agreement. The code that is 
> contributed is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
>
> The original contributor does retain Copyright, which does provide for 
> legal protections for Corporate contributors, as well as aligning into 
> retained Patents on inventions implemented through code contributed 
> (and licensed) to OpenStack.

Yes, that much is true. But this happens without a copyright statement 
in the source file. There are a number of reasons for not having 
copyright statements in the code:

* If I edit a file and it says at the top that the file is copyright 
BigCo, I am discouraged from editing that file, because of the 
implication that I'm treading on someone else's toes. Files should not 
have any indication that they are "owned" by any one person or company. 
This actively discourages people jumping in a fixing stuff.

* If N people contribute to a file, are we supposed to have N copyright 
statements in the file? This doesn't scale over time.

* Having author names in a file encourages people to contribute for the 
wrong reasons.

* Git keeps track of who contributed what changes. It's not necessary to 
have explicit copyright statements.

Copyright statements to individuals or companies in source files seems 
very anti-community to me. Perhaps this is years of Apache 
indoctrination speaking - we had this argument ten years ago at the ASF, 
and author names in source files were strongly discouraged at that time, 
due to all of the reasons listed above. I consider the first one the 
most compelling. Anything that we can do to encourage beginners to jump 
in and start working, we should. Having a (implied) "this file is owned 
by BigCo Inc" statement at the top of a file works actively against that.


>
> Regards,
>
> Colin
>
> *Colin McNamara*
> People | Process | Technology
> --------------------------------------------
> *Mobile*: 858-208-8105
> *Twitter:*@colinmcnamara <http://www.twitter.com/colinmcnamara>
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> *Email*:colin at 2cups.com <mailto://colin@2cups.com>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 14, 2014, at 10:15 AM, Rich Bowen <rbowen at redhat.com 
> <mailto:rbowen at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>> I'm looking at the source of the Ceilometer docs, and several of the 
>> files have copyright statements in the, attributing them to, eg, 
>> Rackspace or DreamHost. What's the policy on this? Surely these are 
>> now copyright OpenStack Foundation? Particularly as they accrue 
>> commits from a variety of different people. Is it actually desirable 
>> to anyone to keep these copyright statements in these files?
>>
>> --Rich
>>
>> -- 
>> Rich Bowen - rbowen at redhat.com <mailto:rbowen at redhat.com>
>> OpenStack Community Liaison
>> http://openstack.redhat.com/
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Openstack-docs mailing list
>> Openstack-docs at lists.openstack.org
>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-docs
>

-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen at redhat.com
OpenStack Community Liaison
http://openstack.redhat.com/

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