[openstack-tc] Copyrights and License Headers in source files

John Griffith john.griffith at solidfire.com
Wed May 1 22:57:56 UTC 2013


On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Russell Bryant <rbryant at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 05/01/2013 06:12 PM, Monty Taylor wrote:
> >
> >
> > 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.
>
> +1
>
> > 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...
>
> It's quite irritating.  It's not clear at all what the intention is.
> Here are some examples:
>
>
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/accurate-capacity-of-clusters-for-scheduler
>
>
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/deploy-vcenter-templates-from-vmware-nova-driver
>
>
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/esx-resource-pools-as-compute-nodes
>
>
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/multiple-clusters-managed-by-one-service
>
> I emailed the submitted and asked for clarification on the intent, but
> haven't heard anything back.
>

You're much kinder than I Russell, I've just not accepted them and used
equivalents that were written by others without the copyright.


>
> Monty, since the ones I've noticed are from HP, perhaps this is
> something you can help track down?
>
> >>     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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> >>     OpenStack-TC at lists.openstack.org
> >>     <mailto:OpenStack-TC at lists.openstack.org>
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> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
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> >>
> >
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> >
>
>
> --
> Russell Bryant
>
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