[ClusterLabs Developers] Feedback wanted: proposed new copyright policy for Pacemaker

[Ken Gaillot]

There's a pull request for the new policy in case anyone is interested:

https://github.com/ClusterLabs/pacemaker/pull/1716


On Wed, 2019-03-06 at 10:08 -0600, Ken Gaillot wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Until now, Pacemaker's policy for copyright notices has been to let
> the
> original author of a file write the notice, and then just update the
> year after that, regardless of who else edits the file.
> 
> As time goes on, and especially as Pacemaker creator Andrew Beekhof
> reduces his involvement, that's becoming awkward. Most files have
> been
> edited by numerous contributors.
> 
> Red Hatter Jan Pokorný raised the issue recently, and we came up with
> some ideas. After running those by a lawyer, we arrived at this
> proposed copyright notice for Pacemaker files:
> 
>     Copyright YYYY-YYYY the Pacemaker project contributors
> 
>     The version control history for this file may have further
> details.
> 
> It was interesting to me at least that copyright notices do not
> affect
> copyright ownership at all; they are merely hints for who to go
> asking
> about it. Actual copyright ownership follows applicable laws and
> regulations, which for most countries say that copyright attaches to
> the author, or to the employer if the work was produced as a work for
> hire. (That of course is my non-lawyerly understanding of the
> matter.)
> 
> The proposed notice above points to the version control, which
> provides
> information about the authors of each change to the file. That should
> generally be sufficient, but if any author wants an explicit
> copyright
> notice for their changes, they can put that in their commit message.
> 
> If there are no objections, I'll formalize that as the Pacemaker
> project policy. I've already cleared it with Beekhof, so I'll update
> files with his notice to the new format, and also contact other
> people
> as needed for other files.
-- 
Ken Gaillot <kgaillot at redhat.com>