Seeking input from developers: glibc copyright assignment policy.

[Paul Eggert]

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.

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.

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>.

To software developers this may all sound like a bunch of bureaucratic 
paperwork, but I can assure you that to a copyright attorney this stuff 
can be a big deal.