[PATCH weston] Update COPYING

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 17 February 2017 at 17:12, Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 07:50:45AM -0600, Derek Foreman wrote:
>> How about we just remove all the copyrights from COPYING and let
>> anyone that needs to collate this list do it themselves...
>>
>> That way we don't need to remember to update it in 2 weeks when
>> someone adds a copyright to a file and doesn't realize we duplicate
>> the info in COPYING? :)
>
> +1
>
> It seems atypical amongst open source projects to have an exhaustive
> (and duplicative as pointed out) listing of copyright statements.  Has
> there been an issue raised from outside the project that this listing
> would solve?

The X projects all have it, at least. Everyone who distributes it
(distributions, companies building products, etc) need to have
something that at least minimally conforms to the Mesa licensing
document: a full statement of the license, and at least a vague
indication of the copyrights. Depending on the legal department
involved, they may end up compiling this exact list for their own use.
Either way, just deleting the entire thing is going to unnecessarily
annoy downstreams.

I'd be fine to reduce it to the minimal license text, but that doesn't
free us up from needing to check incoming source to make sure it
conforms to the same license. We should really also merge data/COPYING
into the core COPYING.

Cheers,
Daniel