Re: Maintaining copyright notices

[Ben Abbott]

> On Jan 3, 2020, at 4:10 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> The Octave source files currently contain copyright notices that list 
> individual contributors.  I adopted these file-scope copyright notices 
> because that is what everyone was doing 30 years ago in the days before 
> distributed version control systems.  But now, with many contributors and 
> modern version control systems, having these file-scope copyright notices 
> causes trouble when we update copyright years or refactor code.
> 
> Over time, the file-scope copyright notices may become outdated as new 
> contributions are made or code is moved from one file to another. Sometimes 
> people contribute significant patches but do not add a line claiming 
> copyright.  Other times, people add a copyright notice for their contribution 
> but then a later refactoring moves part or all of their contribution to 
> another file and the notice is not moved with the code.  As a practical 
> matter, moving such notices is difficult -- determining what parts are due to 
> a particular contributor requires a time-consuming search through the project 
> history.  Even managing the yearly update of copyright years is problematic.  
> We have some contributors who are no longer living.  Should we update the 
> copyright dates for their contributions when we release new versions?  
> Probably not, but we do still want to claim copyright for the project as a 
> whole.
> 
> To minimize the difficulty of maintaining the copyright notices, I would like 
> to change Octave's sources to use what is described here
> 
> https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html
> 
> in the section "Maintaining centralized copyright notices":
> 
>  The centralized notice approach consolidates all copyright
>  notices in a single location, usually a top-level file.
>  This file should contain all of the copyright notices
>  provided project contributors, unless the contribution was
>  clearly insignificant. It may also credit—without a copyright
>  notice—anyone who helped with the project but did not
>  contribute code or other copyrighted material.
> 
>  This approach captures less information about contributions
>  within individual files, recognizing that the DVCS is better
>  equipped to record those details. As we mentioned before, it
>  does have one disadvantage as compared to the file-scope
>  approach: if a single file is separated from the distribution,
>  the recipient won’t see the contributors’ copyright notices.
>  But this can be easily remedied by including a single
>  copyright notice in each file’s header, pointing to the
>  top-level file:
> 
>    Copyright YYYY-YYYY The Octave Project Developers
> 
>    See the COPYRIGHT file at the top-level directory
>    of this distribution or at https://octave.org/COPYRIGHT.html.
> 
> followed by the usual GPL copyright statement.
> 
> The COPYRIGHT file would also point to the COPYING file and the AUTHORS file. 
>  A draft version of that file is attached.  I created it from Mercurial 
> history and old ChangeLog files (for even older changes).  I did not generate 
> it directly from the Copyright lines in current source files because those 
> lines have things like copyright years updated just because we were updating 
> years and those dates have nothing to do with the years people actually made 
> contributions.  I'd rather avoid propagating the mistake of updating 
> copyright years for people who are no longer contributing (possibly because 
> they are dead).
> 
> In the future, we will update copyright years for each contributor listed in 
> the COPYRIGHT file.  If we are doing that from Mercurial history each year, 
> then it seems easier than attempting to do it for each source file.
> 
> Then the guidelines for updating copyright info each year would be something 
> like
> 
>  * Update the dates the copyright statements of each file
>    so that all source files list the current year.  I believe
>    this is justified because the Octave developers are claiming
>    copyright for the project as a whole and we publish a version
>    during the current year (even without a formal release, the
>    sources are published on the web always).
> 
>  * Update the dates in the COPYRIGHT file for anyone who
>    contributed some change during the year.  It should be
>    easy to generate a list of contributors from the hg history
>    and fairly easy to match them up with previous contributors
>    listed in the COPYRIGHT file.  Should we also try to skip
>    trivial changes?  If so, then maybe we should make it
>    possible to automate this job by tagging such changes with a
>    "[trivial change]" marker in the commit message.
> 
> Should the COPYRIGHT file include email addresses with the names?  For now, I 
> have them as <...> in the attached copy but the original version that I 
> created includes the full addresses.
> 
> Additionally, I think it is time to drop the "Author:", "Created:", 
> "Adapted-by:" and similar lines that appear in some source files since that 
> information is incomplete, tends to become inaccurate over time, and is 
> duplicated in the version control system (where it is also most likely to be 
> correct).
> 
> I'm ready to make these changes prior to the 6.1 release but would like to 
> hear from others before proceeding.
> 
> jwe
> <COPYRIGHT.txt>

The proposal is ok with. I have no preference with regards to the email 
addresses.

Ben