license notices (was: [PATCH xorg-docs 0/3] Build CTEXT ICCCM XLFD specs)

[Alan Coopersmith]

Matt Dew wrote:
> That brings up something I'm curious about.
> Currently the copyright notices in all the documents are mostly
> similar, but little differences here and there, like the years are
> different.  Also, some are shared between X Consortium and other
> entities like DEC.  Is it possible that we could have a common
> copyright file and then include that everywhere so it would be
> consistent?

You have no idea just how bad it is.   I recently had the joyous
experience of collecting all these license notices from all the
X.Org modules they ship and pasting them into a OpenOffice document
for our lawyers to read - even after removing all the duplicates,
it was over 150 pages long.   (Fortunately, scripting magic did most
of the gathering and de-duplication, but that's still about 149 pages
longer than it should be.)

I would love to reduce the license form proliferation, and we have
made progress here as various license holders have agreed to adopt
the format X.Org has chosen as our preferred format, abandoning older
forms in which each copyright holder inserted their name directly
into the text, or with slightly differently worded disclaimers, but
we need the copyright owners to agree to relicense their code here.

I managed to get Sun to agree to this last year, as noted in
 http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2009-November/003670.html
and pushed all the changes by early this year to remove Sun custom
licenses and replace them all with the X.Org standard form, but as
you note, there's much larger sets left from DEC, MIT, and The Open
Group, plus dozens of smaller sets from other companies/individuals.

(I actually took an action item at a board meeting this summer to
 talk to the Open Group about this, but haven't done so yet.)

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System