Re: [Lxde-list] RFC: License headers cleanup

[Luís P. <lui...@gm...>]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 7:53 AM, Jerome Leclanche <je...@le...> wrote:
> Hi list
>
> For a fairly long time I've been meaning for us to clean up our
> license headers. They're currently all over the place - some files not
> displaying the proper license, etc.

We definitely must have well defined license policy and guidelines.
>
> As I was saying yesterday on IRC, what matters (unless *explicitly
> specified*) is the license of the project, as specified in the
> AUTHORS/COPYING/README file.
>
> To restore the order, I suggested a short, global license header which
> would apply to *all* files and never change. It doesn't specify
> copyright years, authors, anything like that - just redirects to an
> AUTHORS file for authorship, and a LICENSE file for license text.
>
> This is something we've looked into and put in action previously for
> the Pootle project. The *GPL license header is there to identify the
> license for standalone distributed files. As most of our files in all
> our projects are completely irrelevant standalone, we can explicitly
> direct onlookers to other files without spelling everything out in the
> file itself.
>
> This is the current proposal for the license header:
>
> /*
> * Copyright (c) LXQt contributors.
> *
> * This file is part of the LXQt project. <http://lxqt.org>
> * It is distributed under the LGPL 2.1 or later license.
> * Please refer to the LICENSE file for a copy of the license, and
> * the AUTHORS file for copyright and authorship information.
> */
Does this mean that LXQt only accepts code from people who assigns the
Copyright to the LXQt contributors ?

As far as was once explained to me, by an lawyer, assigning the
copyright to an non legally existent entity is bad practice. The LXQt
contributors don't have legal existence. Who are they ? In order to do
an Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA) or an Contributor License
Agreement (CLA), the original authors must sign a legal document. It
is of course necessary that "the project" be some kind of legal
entity.

> An initial PR, affecting just lxqt-about, was filed by @agaida here:
>   https://github.com/lxde/lxqt-about/pull/12
>
> Please leave any comments, objections or +1s you may have there. If
> you are a core contributor to LXQt please consider this a request,
> it's important to have everybody's greenlight on this and we'd like to
> land it asap (and in 0.10).
>
> As a personal note, this is a practice I'd like to see other projects
> adopt. License headers are an ugly, unnecessary mess. They tend to be
> outdated very quickly and are more often than not misleading. Shorter,
> cleaner license headers that do not need to be updated are better for
> everybody.

They indeed ugly.

Are there any copyright experts around ?
Thanks Jerome for bringing this up. It's an boring and slippery issue,
although and extremely important one. And it was never discussed,
AFAIK.

-- 
        Luís Pereira