license notices

[Alan Coopersmith]

Matt Dew wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Alan Coopersmith
> <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
>> 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.)
> 
> 
> (crying softly into keyboard)
> So then, one of the steps we need to do then is to contact all the
> other organizations that share copyright notices and ask them if the
> files can be changed (by them) to use the Xorg preferred license?  Is
> anyone working on that?  I know you're busy, is that something someone
> could help with?

Yes, I believe that's what needs to happen, and I'm not aware of anyone
working on it.   As discussed at XDS, we should consult with our legal
counsel at SFLC before running off to contact the copyright owners.

> Is this something we could put on the TODO/XorgJanitor's list for
> interested newbies?

Perhaps, once we've figured out the exact work required.   Looking at
previous relicensing projects like Mozilla may be useful, or may not,
since most of the ones I'm aware of were more about getting all the
copyright holders to agree to changes to an already-shared license
notice, instead of getting them to agree to change from per-holder
license notices to a common/shared notice.

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