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Question re: copyright notices in free software source code

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<347239FD-4FC5-428F-961C-49E518578F2F@jonmsterling.com>
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Dear Drew,

I am the maintainer of a free software project called Forester 
(https://sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester/), which is distributed under GPL. 
However, it came to my attention that GPL requires a copyright notice to 
appear somewhere and we had none in our repository.

This got me wondering what the right way to handle this is, and I 
figured you have an expert opinion based on some of your blog posts that 
I have read. The questions are:

1. Should copyright be explicitly attributed to each individual 
contributor? Or to "The Contributors" as a whole? What are the legal 
implications of the latter, if any?

2. Should copyright notices be installed in each file, or at the root 
directory?

I understand that there can be many answers to these questions that 
depend on the project, but I would like to understand a 'best practice' 
that applies to the 'average' free software project in which 
contributors come and go over a long period of time. I would like to 
limit the amount of time and effort I spend trying to track down the 
specifics of someone's contribution (and dealing with the attendant Ship 
of Theseus problem), but I do not want to ask my contributors to assign 
their own copyright to anyone else. I would like the copyright of the 
project, ultimately, to be held in aggregate by the contributors.

Best,
Jon

P.S. (If you have time:) I have read your blog post arguing against CLAs 
and I agree with the points you make. But what do you think about the 
FSF's policy of requiring contributors to assign copyright to the FSF? I 
assume the same arguments apply, but I wanted to make sure that I was 
not missing some subtlety.
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<D55PH51OU1LC.19OXYSJZI0PWH@cmpwn.com>
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<347239FD-4FC5-428F-961C-49E518578F2F@jonmsterling.com> (view parent)
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The simplest answer is stick the text of the GPL in a file called
COPYING and move on. If you care to put in more effort, you can check
out reuse:

https://reuse.software

On Sat Oct 26, 2024 at 11:34 AM CEST, Jon Sterling wrote:
> P.S. (If you have time:) I have read your blog post arguing against CLAs 
> and I agree with the points you make. But what do you think about the 
> FSF's policy of requiring contributors to assign copyright to the FSF? I 
> assume the same arguments apply, but I wanted to make sure that I was 
> not missing some subtlety.

I don't like it.
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<6BE6A923-CBA7-4AD8-BB7C-1A364C43AC49@jonmsterling.com>
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<D55PH51OU1LC.19OXYSJZI0PWH@cmpwn.com> (view parent)
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Many thanks for your input!
Jon


> On Oct 26, 2024, at 12:36 PM, Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com> wrote:
> 
> The simplest answer is stick the text of the GPL in a file called
> COPYING and move on. If you care to put in more effort, you can check
> out reuse:
> 
> https://reuse.software
> 
> On Sat Oct 26, 2024 at 11:34 AM CEST, Jon Sterling wrote:
>> P.S. (If you have time:) I have read your blog post arguing against CLAs
>> and I agree with the points you make. But what do you think about the
>> FSF's policy of requiring contributors to assign copyright to the FSF? I
>> assume the same arguments apply, but I wanted to make sure that I was
>> not missing some subtlety.
> 
> I don't like it.
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