There'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
We've had this discussion before, many times. I've pointed out many times it can be easy, using a form that's now over 20 years old. This is taken from linux.
* * 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.*
*ron*
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 10:07 PM Alexandru Gagniuc mr.nuke.me@gmail.com wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 03.03.2015, 00:06 -0600 schrieb Alexandru Gagniuc:
[…]
And once that's settled, we can start migrating all files to concise notices, while keeping the exact same information we had before.
Unfortunately this never happened despite the fact it was “decided” on in the past leading to the current inconsistencies in the tree.
The question is also, what happens during the upstreaming effort from the Chromium OS commits? It looks like, for example, NVIDIA has its own license headers.
In the past Ron also disagreed on changing headers by Samsung – taken from U-Boot I think – saying their lawyers drafted those and therefore it should stay that way.
Maybe a vote like in *Unifying IO accessor macros* [2] should be done.
[…]
Thanks,
Paul
[1] http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/8488/10/src/cpu/amd/model_10xxx/ram_calc.h [2] http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2015-February/079309.html
On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 12:06 AM Paul Menzel < paulepanter@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
That's right, you don't get to change other people's headers, especially when the headers are created by company lawyers. They get picky that way.
Maybe a vote like in *Unifying IO accessor macros* [2] should be done.
That's not how license headers work. You don't vote to change things that a company requires in code it releases. That's too bad, but that's how it is.
ron
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Alexandru Gagniuc -
Paul Menzel -
ron minnich