[Python-Dev] Copyright notices in modules (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger python at rcn.com
Wed Jan 21 02:20:44 CET 2009

[Raymond Hettinger]

I'm at a loss of why the notice needs to be there at all.

[GvR]

There's a difference between contributing a whole file and contributing a patch. Patches do not require copyright notices. Whole files do. This is not affected by later edits to the file.

That makes sense. In general though, I think if a contributor isn't required by their company to add a copyright, then this sort of thing should be left out of the source code. Most of the contributors here don't seem to copyright-up everything they do (with the exception of big packages or externally maintained resources).

If everyone making a significant contribution has a contributor agreement on file, perhaps we can build a list of those in a single file rather than scattering notices throughout the code. I don't see that those benefit anyone (maintainers, the original contributor, or the contributor's company).

At least these notices are somewhat innocuous. The ones that were the most irritating are the ones requiring a literal copy of the notice to be placed in the docs. A while back, I spent a day getting us in compliance with those.

FWIW, I'm not picking on anyone. I would just like to see a practice emerge where these stop getting added and perhaps start getting removed unless they are actually necessary for some reason (i.e. a company requires it).

AFAICT, little notices like the one atop numbers.py don't confer property rights to anyone. The original purpose of a copyright notice has been lost. It has become useless boilerplate, a toothless warning sign about a unclaimable property claim on donated code.

Raymond

P.S. It seems silly that the copyright on PEP3141 says, "this document has been placed in the public domain" but the code itself has a company copyright. The former seems like something someone would care more about as a creative expression or original research.

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