On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Ricordisamoa
<ricordisamoa(a)openmailbox.org> wrote:
Many of our scripts have copyright notices at the top
like this
(category.py):
# (C) Rob W.W. Hooft, 2004
and then:
# (C) Pywikibot team, 2008-2013
even if most contributors (e.g. Rob W.W. Hooft) are regularly listed in
CREDITS.
Is it to mark the main contributors? I haven't seen that notices being
updated for months, even when some scripts get significantly improved or
rewritten.
They are definitely not being maintained properly, and probably
because nobody knows whose names belong there. I have put up two
patches around updating the 'Pywikipedia' names in core ...
.. to Pywikibot :
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/146405/
.. and to (lowercase) pywikibot
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/147017/
Note that both core and compat LICENSE files include the extra MIT
clause "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." ,
which refers to the one line copyright notice in the LICENSE file.
However almost all modules/scripts include "Distributed under the
terms of the MIT license." with a list of copyright notices above it,
so the logical conclusion is that those copyright notices are cant be
removed because of the flavour of MIT license that pywikibot uses, but
it is not the full MIT license in each file so we might be able to
treat it as optional.
We can refuse to accept patches which include new copyright notices,
although it would be nice to allow a single copyright notice for new
scripts which are substantial work, for the creator of the script.
An idea I suggested on IRC was that we could put a script maintainer
name in / near these copyright notices, if such a person exists, which
could be put into the user agent as the primary contact point. That
is far more valuable than an assortment of names of people who have
contributed to the file up to ten years ago and never maintained the
script.
As Ricordisamoa notes, all names are in the recently created CREDITS
file in core , and a similar CREDITS file can be created for compat .
We might be able to remove copyright notices from each file if LICENSE
mentioned the CREDITS file in the "shall be included", or by asking
contributors accept patches to remove their names from individual
files given they appear in CREDITS and the repository change logs.
--
John Vandenberg