* Copyright 1993 United States Government as represented by the * Director, National Security Agency. * * This software may be used and distributed according to the terms * of the GNU General Public License, incorporated herein by reference.
it doesn't get much simpler than that. I just wish we could get buyin. You're not required to cite the NSA. use your own company.
ronThere's this thing called a copyright notice, which is pretty cool. When
coding on 24" monitors or larger, it's this tiny thing that keeps some legal
history of a file. The world is perfect and there are no issues!
Then FSF comes and teaches us to be in-your-face with a 20+ line copyright
notice, and laptops happen. And 14" screens become a long-forgotten glory. Now
you have to *BLEEP*ing scroll down every time you open a file just to get to
the real content. It becomes so annoying, that I will personally stop giving
positive gerrit scores on any CL that introduces such a file.
Then we get to situations where we waste all that copyright notice space for
one line of code [1]. This madness has to stop.
Tell me what the file does, add your (C) line, tell me how you license the
file, and move on! Start coding already for *BLEEP*'s sake! Here:
/*
* On copyright notices: Angry email to coreboot mailing list
*
* Copyright (C) Some really pissed off guy <angry@mad.com>
* Licensed under WTFPL, or, at your option, Allah Akbar public license.
*/
There, you've achieved the same thing as that abomination of notice that we
need to change whenever some third party moves its headquarters. Now I can
open a file and see
/*
* On the subject of flowers and sunny skies
*
...
and I immediately know I'm in the wrong place. Be pragmatic! Be practical!
Tell me what your file does. Talk about it. Document stuff. It's a much better
use of space. I could probably kidnap any of you, torture you asking for your
bank information, and you'd be much more likely to recite, without error, all
versions of the GPL.
And once that's settled, we can start migrating all files to concise notices,
while keeping the exact same information we had before.
TL;DR
1) Tell me about your file
2) Add your (C) line
3) Document the license of your choosing (in 1 line)
4) Move on to coding!
[1] http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/8488/10/src/cpu/amd/model_10xxx/ram_calc.h
Alex
--
coreboot mailing list: coreboot@coreboot.org
http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot