Hi Stephen,
Yes, generally you can shorten it as long as it is still easily readable by
humans and the linked references contains all the required copyright and
licensing information (note my response below was meant as a general
example for MediaWiki based on best practices rather than advice on the
specific language we must use). For example, while removing the Copyright
word with © might shorten things, it might make it harder for someone to
search for the copyright information via the word "Copyright". As a
certain point, making the header more concise might no longer be worth the
cost to user comprehension.
Thanks,
Zhou
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 17:21:53 -0600
From: Stephen Niedzielski
<sniedzielski(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks
Message-ID:
<CANMtf2doHfh54qE=UGNrEZb0W=
nh7guPd4kebJbYczVSVK6+fQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Zhou, thanks for your comment. Would it be possible to put the entire
license on one line? Using your example:
This file is part of the MediaWiki Project.
Copyright 2015 The MediaWiki
Project Developers. For full copyright information and
for the licensing
terms governing the project and all its files, see the COPYING file at the
top-level directory of this distribution and at
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/COPYING.
Is there anything creative we could do to shorten that line? Maybe replace
Copyright with ©, and use a (permanent) shortened link for the URL and drop
the reference to the top-level directory?
--stephen
On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Zhou Zhou <zzhou(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everyone,
Thanks to Gergo for bringing up this issue. Everyone has raised good
points and I just want to link to existing guidance from the Software
Freedom Law Center
<
https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html
on
best practices for developers to address the problem of long license and
copyright headers by linking to external files. As noted in the
guidance
document, by referencing the appropriate
information files located in a
centralized location, not only do we reduce clutter in the header but we
also increase maintainability of license and copyright info.
Therefore for the header, as an example, we could have something like
this:
>
> This file is part of the MediaWiki Project. Copyright 2015 The
MediaWiki
> Project Developers.
>
> For full copyright information and for the licensing terms governing
the
project
and all its files, see the COPYING file at the top-level
directory
where in turn the COPYING file could contain references to the updated
list
of authors, a description of the project, and the
licensing information.
As to the specifics of SPDX use for all our projects and licenses, we
will
have to do a little more research on this. Happy
to talk off-thread
about
this as well.
Thanks,
Zhou
> From: Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:03 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>
>
> The Apache license, which is also permissive, has a similar recommended
> file header.
>
> I'd say we just standardize on having the warranty disclaimer and
license
> notice in every file. It's an easy
approach to make sure somebody
reading
the file
can easily tell the license without having to maintain
comprehensive authorship information in every file.
On Oct 27, 2015 14:17, "Ryan Kaldari" <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I was saying that we could go ahead and make this
the standard for
non-GPL
> MediaWiki code (basically, the few MIT licensed extensions). I'm not
sure
> if the advantage of doing that would
outweigh the disadvantage of
having
> a
> > non-standard standard though.
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:06 AM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Are you saying adopting the short license blocks? Or the MIT
license?
> > > Because I'm not sure how the
licenses of extensions would affect
the
> >
license headers in core.
> > On Oct 27, 2015 12:43, "Ryan Kaldari" <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
>
> > <flamebait>
> > I totally support switching to license identifiers instead of
headers,
> > > provided that we also switch our licensing from GPL to MIT or BSD
;)
> > > > </flamebait>
> > > >
> > > > On a serious note, we do have a fair number of extensions that
are
> MIT
> > > > Licensed and could go ahead and adopt this (
> > > >
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:MIT_licensed_extensions
).
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 3:44 AM, Gergo Tisza <
gtisza(a)wikimedia.org
> wrote:
> >
> > > In a recent blog post (
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6867 ) ESR
writes:
> > > >
> > > > High on my list of Things That Annoy Me When I Hack is
sourcefiles
> > that
> > > > > > contain huge blobs of license text at the top. That is
valuable
> >
> territory
> > > > > which should be occupied by a header comment explaining the
code,
> > not a
> > > > > boatload of boilerplate that I’ve seen hundreds of times
before.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > ...and then goes on to explain using SPDX identifiers to refer
to
> >
> licenses,
> > > > which would look something like this:
> > > >
> > > > /* Copyright 2015 by XYZ
> > > > * SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
> > > > */
> > > >
> > > > Any objections to making that the new standard / replacing
existing
> >
blocks
> > > with this? It would make the PHP files a little more readable.
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
--
Zhou Zhou
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
zzhou(a)wikimedia.org
NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged
information in it. If you have received this message by accident, please
delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the
Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal
advice
to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members,
volunteers, or staff
members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please
see
our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
*******************************************
--
Zhou Zhou
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
zzhou(a)wikimedia.org
NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged
information in it. If you have received this message by accident, please
delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the
Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice
to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff
members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see
our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.