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.
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.
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.