Re: Seeking input from developers: glibc copyright assignment policy.

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com>]

On 7/4/21 2:32 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 7/4/21 4:55 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> I would prefer something along the lines “Copyright The glibc 
>> Contributors”.  No year or year range, no individual names.
>> Listing years is apparently not legally required
> 
> That's an oversimplification of copyright law. In the US although no
> copyright notice is legally *required* to hold a copyright, there are
> legal *benefits* to having a proper copyright notice, and the FSF
> surely wants those benefits. So at the very least the FSF must be
> specifically listed in the copyright notice of any file containing
> material copyrighted by the FSF.

We would absolutely continue to honour the requests of the FSF to have
their copyright notice included in the files.

Likewise under DCO we would always have a notice indicating that the
work is copyrighted.
 
> Whether non-FSF copyright owners want to forgo those benefits, is up
> to them. The DCO Sign-off form I've seen doesn't mention this issue,
> so it'd be safer (and more polite) to list each copyright owner.

It is procedurally easier to use a group name: "The GNU Toolchain Authors"
but we can honour requests to do otherwise. 

> A proper copyright notice consists of (1) "©" or "Copyright" or
> "Copr.", (2) the year(s) of first publication of the work, and (3)
> the name(s) of the copyright owner(s). For more details, please see
> Chapter 2200 "Notice of Copyright" of the Compendium of US Copyright
> Office Practices, 3rd edition (2021)
> <https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf>.

As you note, this is not required under the current established
international conventions.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.