Re: A few contributor's questions

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Jan 31, 2014, 17:00 UTC
Message-ID: <87mwic2ijo.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <20140131161924.GA4332@google.com>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> Also keep in mind that you don't need a copyright notice to own
> copyright, that it would be crazy for someone to claim you've assigned
> copyright on your changes without an explicit reassignment,

Not at all crazy: Documentation/SubmittingPatches states that adding a "Signed-off-by:" footer to a commit among other things constitutes agreement to

        Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1

        By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:

        (a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
            have the right to submit it under the open source license
            indicated in the file; or

        (b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
            of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
            license and I have the right under that license to submit that
            work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
            by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
            permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
            in the file; or

Also whether or not this implies an assignment of copyright, it is a reasonable assumption for people working with a copy of Git distributed by tar file or otherwise that a file with such a copyright notice only contains material copyrighted by Junio Hamano. So if I want to assert my copyright in the case of licensing breaches, the party in breach may claim estoppel by me "hiding" material copyrighted by myself in a file with such a notice.

> and that libgit2's git.git-authors file that keeps coming up includes
> a comment with a heuristic for delving into the history to find the
> authors of some code.

Sure. But that does not mean that this is the only means to "reasonably infer" the authorship of a file.

Show 5 quoted lines

> [...]
>> Permissable-Licenses: GPL Version 2 or later
>
> Wouldn't a signed message on your website or some other public place
> (e.g., the mailing list) do the trick?

Legally? Sure. The whole point of such a notice in the commit message (or in some central file in the Git repository) is to save people the hassle of second-guessing or sleuthing for every single contribution.

Show 6 quoted lines

> Or a sentence in a commit message saying
>
>  "I'd be happy to have these changes relicensed under the GPL version
>  2 or later."
>
> sounds fine to me, at least.

It's verbose and cumbersome enough that I would not have been surprised if there'd be an established way of getting this information on record, preferably per-project rather than per-commit. If it's going to be per-commit, a footer line would be less obtrusive than a whole sentence.

But it would seem that there's no rule/standard here.

Thanks

-- 
David Kastrup