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.
On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Ricordisamoa ricordisamoa@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
I think most contributors won't mind having their names removed from scripts, especially if their last commit was years ago. Then, there wasn't a CREDITS file nor (AFAIK) a streamlined development process. The idea of «asking contributors accept patches to remove their names» sounds interesting to me.
Il 18/07/2014 13:58, John Mark Vandenberg ha scritto:
On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Ricordisamoa ricordisamoa@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
Pywikipedia-l mailing list Pywikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/pywikipedia-l
pywikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org