Open Stack

On 05/01/2013 06:05 PM, John Griffith wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Mark Washenberger
> <mark.washenberger at markwash.net <mailto:mark.washenberger at markwash.net>>
> wrote:
> 
>     Hi folks,
> 
>     I was looking into the ASL-2.0, and chanced across the fact that in
>     Apache projects, they require that source files only have the
>     License Header, and may not have any copyright notices [1]. It
>     occurred to me that we waste a fair amount of time on copyrights in
>     license headers, and it would be nice not to have to do that anymore.

I would like to hear more about the time waste there - where are we
spending time? Can we do something to make that better?

> I think that only applies to code submitted directly to ASF, but
> regardless you wouldn't get any objections from me regarding your
> proposal.  Some of the legal teams in companies involved in OpenStack
> however may feel differently.  

And some of the developers. I would not like that.

I would really like to see more folks learn about appropriate addition
of copyright attribution when they work on a file, because I think it's
quite important. Don't think that removing attribution from each file
would prevent people from needing to do it - if we moved to a NOTICE
file system, they'd need to put the notice there.

I also think that it's important that the attribution be per-file and
not just in a NOTICE file, because the world has moved on from the days
when tarballs were the primary mechanism of source code distribution. We
publish this all on the web now. So this:

https://github.com/openstack-dev/pbr/blob/master/pbr/packaging.py

without per-file attribution, would not indicate who the license
associated with this file was from.

> I'm actually more troubled by seeing folks put copyright headers on
> blueprints.

Fascinating. I wonder if they realize that they're just asserting
copyright on the text of the blueprint itself...

>     I also noticed a previous conversation [2] on this subject. I have
>     not found any policy that actually requires us to include copyrights
>     with each source file license header.
> 
>     Feel free to suggest that this is more trouble than it is worth, but
>     I'd like to propose that we discourage new contributions from
>     including copyright attribution, and provide a process to work with
>     the various parties we have to remove the copyrights from existing
>     files. Somewhere along the line, somebody (maybe even me!) could
>     write some appropriate hooks to ensure the (now identical) license
>     header is present in every file for every submission.
> 
>     Also, feel free to suggest that I'm plain wrong and am still wet
>     behind the ears--I won't be terribly surprised!
> 
>     [1] http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#headers
>     [2]
>     http://markmail.org/message/eawha7pjiqoslm66?q=openstack+license+source+header
> 
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