[oi-dev] Copyright for contributors - not in files, OI branded zones, binary compatibility

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Jul 22, 2013, at 2:03 AM, Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:

> Garrett D'Amore <garrett.damore at dey-sys.com> wrote:
> 
>>> CDDL should not contain changes to itself, nor additional copyright
>>> notices of any kind.
>> 
>> Its inappropriate (and in violation of the license terms) to modify the CDDL license or boilerplate on code that you are not the sole author of.  That boiler plate has *nothing* to do do with the copyright notices, except that without a copyright notice, it becomes impossible to verify *ownership* of the contribution, which is vital.
> 
> I am not sure what you understand by "boilerplate", but I believe that people 
> usually understand by boilerplate the copyright notice that is typically at the 
> beginning of a file.
> 
> It is of course apropriate to change the boilerplate, in special as Sun agreed 
> with the community to put "CDDL version 1.0 only" in that text and this text was 
> later mofified to read any CDDL version…

Sun should *not* have made any such modification to a file that had contributors to which it was note the sole owner, unless it had explicit approval to do so from any joint contributors.  The CDDL itself forbids modification or alteration of the copyright or license notices.

> 
> Now that Sun was sold to Oracle and Oracle stopped contributing to the project, 
> we need to be very careful and I thus strongly recommend to change the CDDL 
> boilerplate to again contain "CDDL version 1.0 only" in case someone edited a 
> file. Without doing that, Oracle could in theory create a CDDL-1.x or a CDDL-2.x
> that says "everything could be used by Oracle as closed source".

Yes.  Its actually a little worse than that -- the boilerplate *itself* is possibly subject to copyright, and using Sun's boilerplate in new files may actually require crediting Sun/Oracle with joint ownership. 

These problems are precisely why I've authored new boilerplate, stating explicitly 1.0, made the boilerplate public domain explicitly, and posted that boilerplate in usr/src/prototypes.  I encourage anyone writing *new* files to use those files as starting points.

For folks editing existing code, if the file already carries a notice you cannot modify if.  But if the license does not already explicitly say 1.0, you can insert a new notice like this:

/*
 * Portions Copyright 2013 Joe Contributor.  Contributions by Joe Contributor are made available under
 * the terms of the CDDL 1.0 only.
 */

That makes it pretty clear. :-)

	- Garrett

> 
> Jörg
> 
> -- 
> EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
>       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
>       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
> URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
> 
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