Open Stack

You make valid points, the one I agree with the strongest is that we need to remove barriers to code contribution. 

You are correct that managing copyright through DVCS is possible, there are common operations (such as a copy of a file, and then adding it to your commit) that break the commit log chain of custody. 

One thing to consider is that  both Corporations and Individuals have a legal need and right of retaining copyright to contributed code and also CLEARLY identifying code. The risk of removing copyright information from the file header is that anyone using that portion of code cannot clearly and easily identify the copyright holder (copyright is held whether it is noted or not). This puts both individuals and corporations at risk of copyright infringement litigation. Sadly, in the eyes of the law ignorance of infringement does not remove the risk of litigation. 

To quote recommendations from GPL and Apache 2.0 licenses - 

"Free Software Foundation in the GPL’s epilogue “How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs.”6 The FSF recommends placing the following information in each source file’s header: 1) one sentence naming and describing the program; 2) the copyright notice of the author(s); 3) a statement that the program is free software and naming the license(s) under which it is available; 4) a brief warranty disclaimer; and 5) a URL pointing to a full copy of the license. The Apache Software Foundation recommends a very similar notice for Apache-licensed projects.""
Regards,

Colin

Colin McNamara
People | Process | Technology
--------------------------------------------
Mobile: 	858-208-8105
Twitter:	@colinmcnamara
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Email:	colin at 2cups.com	







On Jan 14, 2014, at 10:40 AM, Rich Bowen <rbowen at redhat.com> wrote:

> 
> 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
>> Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/colinmcnamara
>> Blog: www.colinmcnamara.com
>> Email: colin at 2cups.com 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jan 14, 2014, at 10:15 AM, Rich Bowen <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
>>> 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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