Open Stack

I went ahead and moved the conversation over to legal-discuss. Which was
probably a mistake for the sake of archives, but oh well. Got this very
interesting response.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com>
Date: Thu, May 2, 2013 at 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: [legal-discuss] [openstack-tc] Copyrights and License Headers
in source files
To: Mark Washenberger <mark.washenberger at markwash.net>
Cc: legal-discuss at lists.openstack.org


On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 08:56:03AM -0700, Mark Washenberger wrote:
>
>
>     This is really an education issue. Lots of first time Open Source
folks on
>     the project that don't understand that copyright + license grant in
each
>     file is actually quite important to ensure things are actually Open
Source
>     in all jurisdictions.
>
>
> This seems to be the detail I was missing. Can someone elaborate a bit
about
> where this is a problem?

While I can't speak of 'all jurisdictions', just as a matter of common
practice in open source projects this is not so, and I'm not sure what
the notice 'ensures'. There is no particular *need* to have a
copyright notice and license grant in each file; if that were so then
probably half or more of all open source projects, including, no
doubt, OpenStack dependencies, would fail the test. There are some
arguments in favor of having such notices in each file, but there are
also arguments against (well, particularly with respect to copyright
notices, as over time they tend to become misleading as indications of
the actual provenance of the file in question).

Aaron Williamson wrote a good article on this topic, though I don't
agree with all of his recommendations:
http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html

- RF
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