[doc] Update copyright

[adegroote]

Add ISAE to the list of copyright handler, as they supported most of the development last year. It is ok for everyone ?

[severin-lemaignan]

To be honest, I'm not sure about the 'right way' here: to the extend of my understanding, the copyright of MORSE doesn't actually belong to LAAS, ONERA or ISAE since we never got any external contributor to sign a copyright transfer agreement.

So I would be in favor of removing completely the copyright notices.

@mherrb may have a better picture of the issue, though.

[adegroote]

To be fair, I personally don't care at all :)

For CTA, I don't think it is required. I think I signed only two (one for NetBSD, one for JaneStreet) in my all life (FSF requires it also). (and for NetBSD, it is just to become 'developer', not for single patch).

[mherrb]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2016 at 01:40:18AM -0800, Séverin Lemaignan wrote:

To be honest, I'm not sure about the 'right way' here: to the extend of my understanding, the copyright of MORSE doesn't actually belong to LAAS, ONERA or ISAE since we never got any external contributor to sign a copyright transfer agreement.

So I would be in favor of removing completely the copyright notices.

You cannot legally remove the copyright notices. Without a copyright holder that actually grants the permissions listed in the license, the license is invalid. As far as I know the Debian project will reject the package if it has no copyright notice.

@mherrb may have a better picture of the issue, though.

For people working for some employers, the copyright generally goes to the employer. This is especially true for french public entities like LAAS/CNRS, ISAE or ONERA. (there is a special case for interns, but I don't feel comfortable enough with the legal terms in english to try to explain it here).

People who work on Morse on their free time or have a specific agreement with their employer keep their rights.

The full license for MORSE should include all copyright notices of the various copyright holders.

There are 2 reasons to get contributors to transfer their rights to some common entity:

• simplify the license file maintainance (some users are sensitive to the FUD around long lists of licenses and copyright notices)
• have a single entity able to take legal action in case of copyright violation or changes to the license terms.

In my opinion it's not worth the trouble.

So to go back to Arnaud's initial question, yes you should add ISAE to the list of contributors, and an ISAE copyright notice to files you touched significantly since you started working there...

Matthieu Herrb

[adegroote]

On 04/Feb - 02:39, Matthieu Herrb wrote:

So to go back to Arnaud's initial question, yes you should add ISAE to the list of contributors, and an ISAE copyright notice to files you touched significantly since you started working there...

Unfortunately, we never track properly copyright by file. Doing it now will be very cumbersome. So I guess I will just update the top files, as proposed in the PR.

[mherrb]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2016 at 04:06:33AM -0800, Arnaud Degroote wrote:

On 04/Feb - 02:39, Matthieu Herrb wrote:

So to go back to Arnaud's initial question, yes you should add ISAE to the list of contributors, and an ISAE copyright notice to files you touched significantly since you started working there...

Unfortunately, we never track properly copyright by file. Doing it now will be very cumbersome. So I guess I will just update the top files, as proposed in the PR.

Yes. If at some point some users of morse require it, the full per-file history is in the git repository. It's not too much of a problem.

In X.Org, after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, their legal department required us to review all Sun copyrights in every file through the project, and potential conflicts. And the Debian project took this opportunity to ask for a general review of all the contributions. So someone had to review the history of each file across serveral different version control systems and several directory hierarchies to collect all the copyrights and different licenses.

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Matthieu Herrb

[severin-lemaignan]

@mherrb Thanks for the details. Does something like: Copyright held by the various authors or the institutions employing them, refer to the AUTHORS file for details could work? An additional note could mention: please refer to the commit history of each file ('git log <file>') to know the exact copyright holders for each file

[mherrb]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2016 at 04:18:31AM -0800, Séverin Lemaignan wrote:

@mherrb Thanks for the details. Does something like: Copyright held by the various authors or the institutions employing them, refer to the AUTHORS file for details could work? An additional note could mention: please refer to the commit history of each file ('git log <file>') to know the exact copyright holders for each file

IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but yes I think this can help answering question that people may ask.

I would write the additional note as

"Please rever to the commit history of each file ('git log ') to list the contributors to each file."

because the git history lists persons, not organisations (especially since some people used an email address that doesn't represent their affiliation).

Having to do a deep audit of the contributors would still be a bit painful, but it would be a great sign that Morse is a success and that

it gets attention from big actors !

Matthieu Herrb

[adegroote]

So the plan is to add this two lines in LICENSE, or remove "old" copyright which will be superseded by these two sentences ? In case 1, should I modify all the other path ?

[severin-lemaignan]

Everywhere 'LAAS/ONERA, LAAS' appears, I would replace by: Copyright held by the MORSE authors or the institutions employing them, refer to the AUTHORS file for the list. The list of the contributors to each file can be obtained from the commit history ('git log <file>').

[mherrb]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2016 at 06:13:14AM -0800, Séverin Lemaignan wrote:

Everywhere 'LAAS/ONERA, LAAS' appears, I would replace by: Copyright held by the MORSE authors or the institutions employing them, refer to the AUTHORS file for the list. The list of the contributors to each file can be obtained from the commit history ('git log <file>').

I'm not sure the above is a valid copyright notice. Some lawyers seem to be very picky on the exact form of the notice to consider it valid (personnaly I find this stupid, but my opinion doesn't count).

I would not change the actual copyright notices in the files in a hurry before releasing 1.4

Add ISAE to the AUTHORS

in LICENSE add

Copyright (c) 2014-2015 ISAE-SUPAERO (or whatever is the correct name)

and then the sentence above.

It is perfectly legit to have several Copyright lines in one file.

Then after 1.4 take the time to get more knowledgeable advice and edit the individual notices in files accordingly if needed.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/morse-simulator/morse/pull/692#issuecomment-179858572

Matthieu Herrb

[severin-lemaignan]

Fine for me.

[adegroote]

Does it look good for you now ? I'm not completely sure for one in conf.py.in, the generated footer is really ugly.

[severin-lemaignan]

If for the minor comment above, good for me (for now at least).

[mherrb]

On Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 01:19:40AM -0800, Séverin Lemaignan wrote:

If for the minor comment above, good for me (for now at least).

You decide at the end but I think that it's confusing the way you've written it. I would have put:

Copyright © 2009-2010 ONERA Copyright © 2009-2016 CNRS-LAAS Copyright © 2015-2016 ISAE-SUPAERO

Which is more in-line with the way other projects do it (see for

instance http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/COPYING)

Matthieu Herrb

[adegroote]

New try for the copyright stuff

[severin-lemaignan]

+1

[adegroote]

Merged in commit 5516c10d