year specification in the copyright header

I like the proposal

I am not a lawyer and consequently don't understand the legal consequences of a comma-separated list with first year and last year of contributions (e.g. "2004, 2017") compared to range of years (e.g. "2004-2017"). Has anyone a better understanding? Is there a general rule? Is there a a different understanding in different countries?

@dschmidtpnj Our legal source here is the Eclipse Handbook (See https://www.eclipse.org/projects/handbook/#ip-copyright-headers). I would suggest that we stick to @tplatzer's proposal, i.e. "2017,2021". This would be conform to the EF Handbook.

Excellent! I wasn't aware of the Eclipse Handbook and that the suggestions within the Handbook are in accordance with this issue. I fully support @tplatzer proposal

I also agree to the proposal

Hey everybody,

I'm just starting to clean up the issue and already came across some issues.

TLDR: The copyright format, as we discussed it, does not match the handbook and I'd propose a general copyright referencing a single NOTICE file, listing the contributors (see Option 3 below).

I need help with defining the NOTICE file

Copyright Format

Let's start with the current copyright header in commonTools.h.

What we've got:

/*******************************************************************************
* Copyright (c) 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 in-tech GmbH
*               2018 AMFD GmbH
*               2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 ITK Engineering GmbH
*               2020 HLRS, University of Stuttgart.
*               2020 BMW AG
*
* This program and the accompanying materials are made
* available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0
* which is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0
*******************************************************************************/

Option 1:

Manual says:

often, most of the content in the file was contributed by the initial copyright owner with subsequent modifications by others being smaller

Would look like:

/*******************************************************************************
* Copyright (c) 2016, 2021 ITK Engineering GmbH and others
*
* This program and the accompanying materials are made
* available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0
* which is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0
*******************************************************************************/

Well, that's not my preference.

Option 2:

Manual says:

if the number of copyright owners is small (e.g. two), there is nothing wrong with listing all of them especially if their contributions are more proportionately equal.

Would look like (authors sorted by year, of contribution or alphabetically if year is the same):

/*******************************************************************************
* Copyright (c) 2017, 2021 ITK Engineering GmbH, in-tech GmbH, AMFD GmbH, 
*                          Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft (BMW AG),
*                          and HLRS, University of Stuttgart
*
* This program and the accompanying materials are made
* available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0
* which is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0
*******************************************************************************/

Well, that's not my preference, too.

Option 3:

Manual says:

Alternatively, project teams can adopt a more generic copyright header for each file and include the identities of the copyright holders in the notice file.

This would look like:

/********************************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) {year} Contributors to the Eclipse Foundation
 *
 * See the NOTICE file(s) distributed with this work for additional
 * information regarding copyright ownership.
 *
 * This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the
 * terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0 which is available at
 * http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0
 *
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0
 ********************************************************************************/

And one NOTICE or NOTICE.md file (both valid) at the root of the repository.

Other information, as deemed necessary by the project team may also be included.

The template in the handbook, does not list the individual contributors explicitly, which i don't really like.

So I propose the following:

# Notices for OpenPASS for Committers

This content is produced and maintained by the Eclipse OpenPASS Working Group.

 * Project home: https://openpass.eclipse.org/

## Copyright

All content is the property of the respective authors or their employers.
The contributors are listed below in the order of their initial contribution:

- 2016 ITK Engineering GmbH
- 2017 in-tech GmbH
- 2018 AMFD GmbH
- 2020 HLRS, University of Stuttgart
- 2020 Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft (BMW AG)

For more information regarding authorship of content, please consult the
repository logs.

## Declared Project Licenses

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the
terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0 which is available at
http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0

In the section about the copyright, the handbook says

The {year} is the year in which the content was created (e.g. “2004”). The date may optionally be set to a range of years with the first and last years of the range separated by a comma.
If we use only the initial creation date, future changes are minimal.
Of course, I'll browse the existing copyrights for the true initial date.

I would really appreciate if we could get that through as fast as possible, so I can continue with the resolution. This means, that I need "NOT OKAY" as well as "OK" from all of you as soon as possible.

I could go with Option 3. Regarding Range or only initial year I have no clear direction. From a dev perspective I would go with the Option which has the least effort to maintain and still fullfills the requirements of eclipse.

closed

reopened

Since I accidentally closed the issue (and now reopened it): I need "NOT OKAY" but also an "OK" (if so) from all of you as soon as possible on that topic.

assigned to @tduongquang, @adascri, @jdobberstein, and @dfix

changed milestone to %Release v0.8

@rparisha2 I agree on option 3 with minor corrections...

As it says in the Project Handbook: "Other information, as deemed necessary by the project team may also be included." So, I don't see a problem with having more details in the Copyright section, although it is not explicitly suggested in the template.

However, I would propose a range of years straight from the beginning: {YearOfFirstContribution}-{YearOfLastContribution} Company

And I am missing "Volkswagen Group of America" in your NOTICE file...

@dfix @rparisha2 I don't see any benefits for us if we provide the information about the year of the last contribution. If we do this we have to update the year of the last contribution probably every year. Furthermore, as you stated, to make things easier it is an optional information which I would leave out. Still, I agree to option 3.

@dfix

I just wanted to make it as easy as possible, so we don't need to update the NOTICE file every year (which people will forget). Do you see any legal issues for the ITK if we skip that information?
Of course, Volkswagen also will be mentioned, but I tried to be consistent with the one copyright example I gave at the beginning of the issue.

@rparisha2 Maybe I misunderstood something. I though it is a SINGLE file on top level. And I also suggest to only have something like this:

2016-2021 ITK Engineering GmbH
2017-2021 in-tech GmbH
...

If we skip the last year, it looks like ITK didn't contribute anything for 5 years ;-)

The effort is minimal: On January 1st, I personally will sit down and replace 2021 with 2022 in each line :-)

Well - it would be the same for anybody else, but I can understand your concern. I'll remind you on new years eve

The effort is minimal: On January 1st, I personally will sit down and replace 2021 with 2022 in each line :-)

... in each line mentioning a contributor who's going to commit something in 2022. I like the idea of an approach of minimal effort, but not at the cost of inconsistencies.

Practical suggestion: We have already defined a process for an external contribution. We will also need to define a process for an internal feature/bugfix contribution. In both, we can add a task: x) Update the Copyright information in "NOTICE" with a year or a new line, respectively

assigned to @dschmidtpnj and @jgainey6qo

I'm OK with option 3!

I'd like to see the authors, as well as the last modification year on each file for various reasons:

Even when having a collaborative project in mind where anyone can participate and contributes to the project as a whole, I like the idea of giving attribution to authors for their individual parts of work
Giving individual attribution may make it easier to contact a specific person regarding detailed questions (i.e. by tagging them in an issue)
The modification date is a quick indicator for an unexperienced contributor if a source file is trustworthy compared to other files (i.e. unused code using the wrong interfaces etc.)

So my preference would be Option 1 (traditional copyright header format), but including item (4). This would account for the individual attribution, and also provides a minimal changelog, which would be an extra benefit for me.

Of course this also means more effort for each author, but the author would at least have the choice to place his individual attribution.

I also thought about just relying on the git repository metadata to identify the contributors. But I think that doesn't suit every aspect. The repository could be transferred to a new one without preserving history, source code can be distributed as simple zip/tar archive etc.

One additional Gedankenexperiment: A file is used regularly, but never changed for about 20 years. After that time it should lose its copyright, right? If we´ve all contributors in one file, this would generalize every copyright for every file, which is easily maintainable but doesn´t feel right.

So for me in each file we have to have at least:

the initial year
the year of last significant change
significant contributors

To easily maintain this copyright proposal we should add a commit pre hook, which automatically sets year, company, author

A file is used regularly, but never changed for about 20 years. After that time it should lose its copyright, right?

IANAL, but I think it's 70 years after the author's passing?

EDIT: Is it also 70 years after a company closing? :-o ???

If we´ve all contributors in one file, this would generalize every copyright for every file, which is easily maintainable but doesn´t feel right.

That's also my feeling, but the 70 years from above would soften that a bit. Still doesn't feel right to me.

Just a different gedankenexperiment: Somebody, who's not officially involved, contributes to the source. How is she attributed right? @rbiegel 's approach on that is simple (in one file)

- She Hulk - Added some green paint

But how would it look in the NOTICE file?

2021 - She Hulk

This would make appear the contribution look larger than it is.

In the end, there is no perfect solution, but we need an agreement. @tduongquang / @adascri: How should we proceed?

It rarely happens that an external contributer will add something to our project. Therefore, we highly appreciate any reasonable contributions which help to improve and grow openPASS. Hence, a mentioning in the NOTICE file, even though the contribution may be small, will show the appreciation of the contribution.

I am more with Reinhard's proposal on the copyright header due to the mentioned benefits.

We have seen approval for option 3 of the initial proposal before Reinhard added his comment but not gotten any feedback on Reinhard's approach. Does anyone object to the copyright being stated in each file individually or also prefers this solution? Please give a short feedback station your preferred solution among the two options.

I just scraped the copyrights from the current servant... In order of appearance, the NOTICE file section would look as:

2016, 2021: ITK Engineering GmbH
2017, 2021: in-tech GmbH
2017, 2019: Volkswagen Group of America
2018, 2019: AMFD GmbH
2019, 2021: Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft (BMW AG)
2020 HLRS, University of Stuttgart

I think it shall look more like so:

2016-2021: ITK Engineering GmbH
2017-2021: in-tech GmbH
2017-2019: Volkswagen Group of America
2018-2019: AMFD GmbH
2019-2021: Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft (BMW AG)
2020: HLRS, University of Stuttgart

...even though it contradicts a little to the Handbook. But comma separated format looks just weird.

Indeed, the dashes look more intuitive. I hope in this case the EF will turn a blind eye.

Since the majority is for Option 3 with the information of the range of the year {YearOfFirstContribution}-{YearOfLastContribution} and @dfix is willing to do the adjustment on each new years eve, I propose to change the NOTICE file accordingly.

@rparisha2 Because you are cleaning up anyway. Can you take over the changes?

@all any remarks?

Doing the adjustments on each new years eve is not sufficient. Most parties will not have made a contribution by 1st January and therefore the copyright would be simply wrong. Indeed is still slightly more complicated and each party is responsible anyways.

Please have a look at https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/simopenpass/simopenpass/-/issues/37#note_188800 . I am in strong favor of continuing the discussion for a short feedback round after the new proposal hasn't gotten a lot of feedback so far (neither positive or negative)

OK! Let's summarize...

First, we have to make one major decision. Please react to this post with:

= CHANGE = move all copyrights into a single file
= NO CHANGE = keep individual copyright in each file

Depending on the result, we see from there...

How about a Meeting and a Pro / Contra list ? :D

Preferred:

/*******************************************************************************
* Copyright (c) 2016-2020 ITK Engineering GmbH
*               2017-2021 in-tech GmbH
*               2018 AMFD GmbH
*               2020 HLRS, University of Stuttgart
*               2020 BMW AG
*
* This program and the accompanying materials are made
* available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0
* which is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0
*******************************************************************************/

closed

mentioned in commit fcebc0ab

mentioned in merge request !61 (merged)

mentioned in merge request mbauerm6f/simopenpass!2 (merged)

mentioned in issue mbauerm6f/simopenpass#1

mentioned in issue yase#4

year specification in the copyright header

Designs

Child items ...

Activity

Copyright Format

What we've got:

Option 1:

Option 2:

Option 3: