[jira] [Comment Edited] (LEGAL-114) License Header - Short Form?

["Noah Slater (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-114?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13679064#comment-13679064 ] 

Noah Slater edited comment on LEGAL-114 at 6/9/13 2:09 PM:
-----------------------------------------------------------

Having talked to Marvin, I am now also -1 for any short form boilerplate which includes a copyright notice.

Specifically, the following board resolutions (and the discussion around them) convinced me:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2004/board_minutes_2004_11_14.txt

http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2006/board_minutes_2006_05_24.txt

My understanding, in summary: The ASF does not hold the copyright to individual contributions, so a per-file ASF copyright attribution would be misleading. On the other hand, using contributor copyright attributions has undesirable social side-effects. So best to just leave it out.

I am now in a position of not knowing what to suggest. A short-form boilerplate would be useful to keep the clutter in small files down, but I do not know how to reword our ratified boilerplate to shorten it to a few lines.

The shortest I think I can get it is: "Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the NOTICE and LICENSE files for more details."

I note that it appears that any such short-form version would have to pass a board resolution.
                
      was (Author: nslater):
    Having talked to Marvin, I am now also -1 for any short form license header which includes a copyright notice.

Specifically, the following board resolutions (and the discussion around them) convinced me:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2004/board_minutes_2004_11_14.txt

http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2006/board_minutes_2006_05_24.txt

My understanding, in summary: The ASF does not hold the copyright to individual contributions, so a per-file ASF copyright attribution would be misleading. On the other hand, using contributor copyright attributions has undesirable social side-effects. So best to just leave it out.

I am now in a position of not knowing what to suggest. A short-form license would be useful to keep the clutter in small files down, but I do not know how to reword our ratified boilerplate to shorten it to a few lines.

The shortest I think I can get it is: "Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the NOTICE and LICENSE files for more details."

I note that it appears that any such short-form version would have to pass a board resolution.
                  
> License Header - Short Form?
> ----------------------------
>
>                 Key: LEGAL-114
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-114
>             Project: Legal Discuss
>          Issue Type: Question
>            Reporter: Roger Meier
>
> Hi all
> Today the license headers within files does need ~ 15 lines within a file.
> This needs lot of space at the top of a file, probably too much if you have a small README file. 
> e.g. http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/thrift/trunk/tutorial/README?view=markup
> Is it possible to use a smaller header reflecting the license terms within a source or README file?
> Can we use something like that one or a shorter one?
> {noformat}
> /*
>  * Copyright (c) The Apache Software Foundation
>  * Licensed to the ASF under one or more contributor license agreements
>  * (see NOTICE file distributed with this work). ASF licenses this file to you
>  * under the following license http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
>  * Software distributed is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES
>  * OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
>  */
> {noformat}
> Should we mention also the License identifier (Apache-2.0) used within spdx standard?
> see http://spdx.org/licenses/
> Thanks,
> Roger

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