Bug 675336 – Add "Gentoo Foundation" to metadata/AUTHORS

• Product: Gentoo Foundation
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Ulrich Müller 2019-01-13 15:43:33 UTC]

Created attachment 560856 [details]
git blame for subversion.eclass

The Gentoo Foundation is a copyright holder of the Gentoo repository, and should therefore be added to the AUTHORS file. According to the guidelines in https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Legally-Significant.html, a contribution of "more than around 15 lines of code and/or text [...] is legally significant for copyright purposes".

To provide one concrete example of code:
- subversion.eclass was originally authored by hattya, and https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/subversion.eclass?annotate=1.8 shows that as of 2004-04-05 he was the only author.
- The author has signed the "Release and Assignment" form on 2003-12-31 (I have a scan of the form, per seemant's archives, see bug 655660).
- Copyright of the tree as of 2004-06-25 was transferred from Gentoo Technologies Inc. to Gentoo Foundation (see https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/glep.git/tree/glep-0076.rst?id=60aede6f2c1a0270c341a23047591885569f0923#n251).
- "git blame" shows that about 30 nontrivial lines of the code from 2004 remain in today's subversion.eclass, see attachment.

[Comment 1 Alec Warner (RETIRED) 2019-01-13 17:17:34 UTC]

(In reply to Ulrich Müller from comment #0)
> Created attachment 560856 [details]
> git blame for subversion.eclass
> 
> The Gentoo Foundation is a copyright holder of the Gentoo repository, and
> should therefore be added to the AUTHORS file. According to the guidelines
> in https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Legally-Significant.html, a
> contribution of "more than around 15 lines of code and/or text [...] is
> legally significant for copyright purposes".

So I find the wording (should / could) a bit odd here. We could add hundreds of contributors who have contributed to Gentoo. We elected to only add people who explicitly request to be added.

So are you requesting we add the Foundation as a Foundation member? I don't think we "should" add everyone who contributed, because we explicitly decided *not* to do that.

> 
> To provide one concrete example of code:
> - subversion.eclass was originally authored by hattya, and
> https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/subversion.
> eclass?annotate=1.8 shows that as of 2004-04-05 he was the only author.
> - The author has signed the "Release and Assignment" form on 2003-12-31 (I
> have a scan of the form, per seemant's archives, see bug 655660).

I'd probably rather release signers from their claims, as opposed to actually claiming copyright in this case.

> - Copyright of the tree as of 2004-06-25 was transferred from Gentoo
> Technologies Inc. to Gentoo Foundation (see
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/glep.git/tree/glep-0076.
> rst?id=60aede6f2c1a0270c341a23047591885569f0923#n251).
> - "git blame" shows that about 30 nontrivial lines of the code from 2004
> remain in today's subversion.eclass, see attachment.

[Comment 2 Ulrich Müller 2019-01-13 20:12:04 UTC]

(In reply to Alec Warner from comment #1)
> So I find the wording (should / could) a bit odd here. We could add hundreds
> of contributors who have contributed to Gentoo. We elected to only add
> people who explicitly request to be added.
> 
> So are you requesting we add the Foundation as a Foundation member?

No. The only purpose was to clarify copyright status, because obviously the Foundation does not occur in commit logs.

Closing as invalid.