Re: copyright notices (was: Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?)

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:31 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On  6-Jan-2011, Olaf Till wrote:
>
> | On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 06:49:45PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> |
> | > Actually, the FSF recommends updating the copyright year in all
> | > files in any year they are published.
> |
> | Really? It seems not appropriate to me if nothing in the file has
> | changed. And in this Howto of the FSF:
>
> Please see
>
>  
> http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html#Copyright-Notices
>
> It includes this statement:
>
>  To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you have
>  made nontrivial changes to the package. (Here we assume you’re using
>  a publicly accessible revision control server, so that every
>  revision installed is also immediately and automatically published.)
>  When you add the new year, it is not required to keep track of which
>  files have seen significant changes in the new year and which have
>  not. It is recommended and simpler to add the new year to all files
>  in the package, and be done with it for the rest of the year.
>
> and now I see later in the file that part of my question is already
> answered:
>
>  But if contributors are not all assigning their copyrights to a
>  single copyright holder, it can easily happen that one file has
>  several copyright holders. Each contributor of nontrivial text is a
>  copyright holder.
>
>  In that case, you should always include a copyright notice in the
>  name of main copyright holder of the file. You can also include
>  copyright notices for other copyright holders as well, and this is a
>  good idea for those who have contributed a large amount and for
>  those who specifically ask for notices in their names. (Sometimes
>  the license on code that you copy in may require preserving certain
>  copyright notices.) But you don’t have to include a notice for
>  everyone who contributed to the file (which would be rather
>  inconvenient).
>
> So I think we should just add the current year to all copyright
> notices in a file when the notices are updated.  I'm now thinking that
> once someone claims copyright on a file, there is no reason to drop
> that person later.
>
> Then all notices could be of the form
>
>   Copyright (C) YYYY-2011 NAME
>
> where YYYY is the first year of claimed copyright (or the year that
> the file first appeared in Octave).  I have no problem with including
> all years since the introduction of the file since there has been
> publication (releases, snapshots, or public CVS/hg archives) in each
> year since 1993.
>
> Doing this would solve most of the problems with updating the notices
> and I think it would be fairly easy to do the update at least
> semi-automatically.  But what should happen to a notice when a file is
> merged with another, or parts are extracted into a separate file?
>
> We would not have to worry about any of this if we assigned copyright
> to a single copyright holder (for example, the FSF, or an "Octave
> Foundation").  But then accepting patches would be slowed by requiring
> coypright assignments.  I would be willing to do it, but I'm not sure
> we could get agreement from everyone who has made substantial
> contributions.
>

I also think that having a written copyright assignment as a
precondition to any significant changes could lose you some potential
contributors. And it's not just because of the copyright itself, but
because programmers are lazy folk :)

> Currently, we have some people who have made large contributions but
> who have not claimed copyright on anything, or at least not on any
> files that they did not create from scratch.  Then there have been
> others who have claimed copyright when they have made only small
> changes.

I think it could help if we more clearly communicate the message that
not putting yourself into the copyright header does not mean you give
up copyright. We track all changes, so a changelog entry is enough to
attribute your change to you forever. The copyright line(s) are more
or less just informative.