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Re: [jgit-dev] RE: [egit-dev] Rewriting JGit history and standard comment template
On 11 Feb 2010, at 00:12, Robin Rosenberg wrote:

onsdagen den 10 februari 2010 23.34.20 skrev  Shawn O. Pearce:
That first line, "Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>" is *not* for the
organization issuing the license.  Its for the copyright holder(s)
of the content(s) of the file(s) that the license was attached to.

Asking us to include "Copyright (c) 2007, Eclipse Foundation,
Inc. and its licensors." as in [3,4] is a literal translation of
the OSI license in [1], without understanding the point of that line.

Yikes.  That scares me even more.

Me too. Someone might actually think Eclipse owns the code, when
it doesn't. I don't think we should do that. Or someone point to to
a place where a laywer explains this is detail. Groklaw?

I don't believe I've ever seen a line which says Copyright (c) Eclipse Foundation Inc. and its licensors at Eclipse. I suspect this must have been a miscommunication, because I don't believe that is sensible. The EPL is a license, not a copyright transfer; and the Eclipse Foundation doesn't receive copyright on any contributions from a committer or a contributor.

For example, this is the header in a random ECF file I happen to have on disk (which is admittedly, for the EPL)

/*******************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) 2006, 2008 Remy Suen, Composent Inc., and others.
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
 * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
 *
 * Contributors:
 *    Remy Suen <remy.suen@xxxxxxxxx> - initial API and implementation
 ******************************************************************************/
package org.eclipse.ecf.protocol.bittorrent;

That's it. There's no copyright grant to the Eclipse Foundation, and there's certainly not pages and pages of text that goes with it. This is the standard kind of header I've been used to in virtually all Eclipse projects I've touched (though most of them have said 'IBM' at some point). If we're being asked to add anything significantly different from this, then it's a change of direction for Eclipse's IP terms which in my mind is a turn for the worse.

The document on the EDL uses the Eclipse Foundation, I hope, as a template:


Eclipse Distribution License - v 1.0
Copyright (c) 2007, Eclipse Foundation, Inc. and its licensors.

In other words, I'd expect that the year and copyright owner to be substituted by those who own the code. From the new BSD:

Here is the license template:

Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>
All rights reserved.

Unless copyright ownership is being transferred to the Eclipse Foundation (which I don't believe it is) then putting the Eclipse Foundation in as the owner (when it's not) would be the wrong thing to do. Furthermore, I don't think it's necessary to include the full body of the license in each header file, in much the same way that the standard EDL header points to a license on disk (and by web). 

Alex

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