[openstack-qa] on copyright notices

Sean Dague sean at dague.net
Thu May 16 10:04:38 UTC 2013


On 05/16/2013 05:25 AM, Giulio Fidente wrote:
> hi all,
>
> not of great interest to many probably but following a recent discussion
> on #openstack-qa regarding the copyright assignment in the source files,
> I decided to investigate this a bit further.
>
> Wikipedia suggests that only copyright holders have the authority to sue
> when a license violation takes place.
>
> Also it seems that software not copyrighted is considered public domain
> software and, as such, can be incorporated into any work whether
> proprietary or free.
>
> I'd say we continue to put the "Copyright $YEAR OpenStack Foundation"
> string on top of the source files, rather than stripping out the notice.
>
> Is there anything wrong in doing that?

Actually, there has been an active discussion on legal-discuss on this - 
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/legal-discuss/2013-May/000022.html

I think the community is currently leaning towards removing the 
copyright statements completely, because they aren't really needed 
(given git history), and they are wildly inaccurate (given that the 
major of folks aren't updating them correctly).

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net



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