Re: A few contributor's questions

Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] writes:

Also keep in mind that you don't need a copyright notice to own
copyright, that it would be crazy for someone to claim you've assigned
copyright on your changes without an explicit reassignment,

Not at all crazy: Documentation/SubmittingPatches states that adding a
"Signed-off-by:" footer to a commit among other things constitutes
agreement to

        Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1

        By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:

        (a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
            have the right to submit it under the open source license
            indicated in the file; or

        (b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
            of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
            license and I have the right under that license to submit that
            work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
            by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
            permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
            in the file; or

The only relevant notice to licensing "indicated in the file" currently
is "Copyright (c) 2006 by Junio Hamano".

Also whether or not this implies an assignment of copyright, it is a
reasonable assumption for people working with a copy of Git distributed
by tar file or otherwise that a file with such a copyright notice only
contains material copyrighted by Junio Hamano.  So if I want to assert
my copyright in the case of licensing breaches, the party in breach may
claim estoppel by me "hiding" material copyrighted by myself in a file
with such a notice.

and that libgit2's git.git-authors file that keeps coming up includes
a comment with a heuristic for delving into the history to find the
authors of some code.

Sure.  But that does not mean that this is the only means to "reasonably
infer" the authorship of a file.

[...]

quoted

Permissable-Licenses: GPL Version 2 or later

Wouldn't a signed message on your website or some other public place
(e.g., the mailing list) do the trick?

Legally?  Sure.  The whole point of such a notice in the commit message
(or in some central file in the Git repository) is to save people the
hassle of second-guessing or sleuthing for every single contribution.

Or a sentence in a commit message saying

 "I'd be happy to have these changes relicensed under the GPL version
 2 or later."

sounds fine to me, at least.

It's verbose and cumbersome enough that I would not have been surprised
if there'd be an established way of getting this information on record,
preferably per-project rather than per-commit.  If it's going to be
per-commit, a footer line would be less obtrusive than a whole sentence.

But it would seem that there's no rule/standard here.

Thanks

-- 
David Kastrup

Hi,

David Kastrup wrote:

Also whether or not this implies an assignment of copyright, it is a
reasonable assumption for

[...]

Since I think we've completely gone off the rails:

I assume the problem you're trying to solve is that files don't have
clear enough notices of their licensing.  That could be a real problem
for people using the code, since if you no one gave you a license then
you don't have a license at all.  It's also a problem in that it makes
it harder to interpret the phrase "under the same open source license"
(though I have no idea how that could be read as "I give up my
copyright completely").

The way git currently works in that area is the same as the Linux
kernel:

 * the code is copyright by the authors and we try not to waste fuss
   on maintaining a comprehensive list in notices.  If you want to
   find the authors to negotiate special licensing, you get to do the
   work.

 * license is GPLv2-only where not otherwise specified

 * relicensing, when needed, happens by contacting all the copyright
   holders and getting their consent

I don't see anything weird about that.  But people using the code
might like clearer notices, so I personally would not mind an extra
line in most files stating the license.  (More than that and it
becomes absurd.)  That's all just my opinion --- Junio might think
differently, etc.

[...]

It's verbose and cumbersome enough that I would not have been surprised
if there'd be an established way of getting this information on record,
preferably per-project rather than per-commit.

For relicensing the existing practice is to just contact people.  That
has the advantage that I can make a decision about whether to allow
relicensing code I've written in the context of how I expect it to be
used.  I expect that if you had a stance on GPLv2+ licensing of
contributions to git published in some place easily found by search
engines (for example a message on the mailing list), interested people
would not have too much trouble finding it when the time comes.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan