[PATCH weston] Update COPYING

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Bryce,
Sorry, totally neglected this whilst travelling.

On 17 February 2017 at 18:09, Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 05:19:55PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
>> On 17 February 2017 at 17:12, Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com> wrote:
>> > 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.
>
> I only spot checked, and you would know better than me, but the ones I
> looked at appeared to just list key/major copyright holders (which does
> seem sensible).  "Vague indications of copyrights", as you mention below.

Hm, xserver I thought was at least exhaustive.

>> 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.
>
> I've done a couple such conformance checks in the past, and indeed I had
> to compile such a list, so you're certainly right.  But as pq showed,
> it's a straightforward set of shell commands to do it.  And actually, if
> I were doing a conformance check, I wouldn't trust that the COPYING file
> was being kept up to date so would do that scan regardless.  Indeed, if
> there were any descrepancies that showed up I would feel compelled to
> investigate each of them.  IOW rather than saving time the COPYING file
> might actually create an bit of extra work for compliance checker.
> Frankly, the script itself might be more valuable in this regard, so
> maybe that's what should be included in the tree?
>
> If the ultimate goal is to help make compliance checking easier, I would
> suggest focusing on fixing any irregularities in the files themselves -
> e.g. continuing to ensuring dates and copyright formats are correct,
> that boilerplate licensing text is consistent across files, etc., as
> folks have been doing, so that running a scan is clean and reliable.
>
> OTOH, if the goal is about giving recognition to contributors, an
> AUTHORS or CONTRIBUTORS file seems to be more conventionally used
> approaches.

Fair enough. FWIW, that wasn't my goal: if I was after more credit,
I'd probably do it in a way which was visible to more than just distro
maintainers and lawyers. :)

>> 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.
>
> Obviously checking licenses on incoming code is always extremely
> important. :-)
>
> I'm not sure what you're suggesting by reducing it to the minimal
> license, the file only includes one license statement so appears to be
> minimal already; I'm not suggesting copyrights *shouldn't* be present,
> or that any of the existing ones should be removed.  AIUI it's required
> to have at least one copyright statement, and seems pretty standard to
> list the major copyright holders (esp. any companies/individuals with a
> legal interest.)  The main purpose of COPYING, though, is the licensing,
> to document how the codebase can be shared and reused.
>
> You're probably right that merging data/COPYING and COPYING makes
> sense, but I've seen enough other projects that had subdir-specific
> licensing gunk that I'm not really worried about it.  I'd be fine
> either way.

Yeah, I don't think we're big enough that having separate files makes
much sense. What I'm mostly just stuck with is the copyright
statements: at the moment, we list a few but don't go on to list any
others. I'd suggest an incomplete statement is the worst of both
worlds: should we maybe just list the applicable licenses with a
'Copyright © 2008-2017 multiple authors' and the license text, with a
note to check the individual files to determine who owns copyright
over which part?

Cheers,
Daniel