Seeking input from developers: glibc copyright assignment policy.

[Paul Eggert]

On 7/6/21 11:05 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:

> Is the “GNU Toolchain Authors” a entity that legally exists?  Only a real
> entity should be listed in a copyright notice.

Yes and no. It's OK for a copyright notice to identify owners by 
reference instead of by naming them explicitly. See section 2205.2(F) of 
the Copyright Compendium I mentioned earlier 
<https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf>. It gives 
"copyright by publisher" as an example, where the publisher must be 
obvious from the rest of the document content.

You're right, though, that without a clear statement of how one maps the 
phrase "GNU Toolchain Authors" to what the phrase refers to, the 
copyright notice would be defective. So far, we haven't come up with a 
clear statement.

Legally speaking, we don't *need* to do anything to the copyright 
notices, if the DCO contributors are OK with that. That is, we can leave 
the existing copyright notices as-is, and not mention DCOed contributors 
at all, unless their contributions contain their copyright notices. That 
would be simplest, in terms of meaning the fewest changes to existing 
source code. However, if we do this we should make the procedure clear 
to everyone concerned.

> I make the case again for moving glibc from a file-by-file copyright
> inventory mechanism to a single, toplevel file

I agree that it'd be helpful to have such a file if well-maintained, 
regardless of whether we make changes to the existing copyright notices. 
I'd welcome contributions along those lines.