On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 03:59:07PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 04:16:09PM +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote:
I know this probably got answered somewhere, but I've never gotten any when asking myself. So let me use this opportunity.
Because I really despise useless processes and duplicated information I always hated the way all the "mandatory" file headers. As far as I understand it's related to the fact that the file itself used to be the only source of information about where the code came from. Nowadays we have more information in git.
The reason all this is happening is to be able to prove that there is traceable source of the code, right? I, personally, do not really like when you get couple of lines of repeated information on every start of the tool (`bc` should only ever be ran with `-q` for any sane person). In my opinion that is never going to help any user.
All of this comes down to whether you prove the above if push comes to shove. GPL talks about the headers and where are all the places you *should* put the copyright notices and license information. But I think it comes to the "should" and since it is written "to make lawyers more confident" about 30 years ago it might've kept some of the reservations from that era.
Finally the question: How much of a problem would it be if we just limited the information in file headers to minimum and pointed people to git history and central license?
Sorry for making you read all this, but I feel like you're very knowledgeable and I struggle with this on a regular basis, so some consensus would help me.
Questions of a legal nature should be addressed to and answered by lawyers, but it's my current understanding that we need the boilerplate in files to make a cast iron assertion of copyright, licensing and warranty conditions. Until a lawyer (from RH Legal in this case) tells me otherwise, I'm afraid we need to keep the boilerplate.
And I understand that is probably the reason nobody can really reply with a clean answer to this. Yeah, you're right, sorry for my rant. To make up for the time wasted (and to regain my sanity in this matter) I will try to seek a proper legal answer to this question.
Rich.
-- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW