FileCopyrightText...

[Neal Gompa]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 9:43 AM Harald Sitter <sitter at kde.org> wrote:
>
> do we really need it?
>
> systemd for example only has a spdx license header, resulting in much
> tidier file headers.
>
> I entirely fail to understand why we need to slap a FileCopyrightText
> on files. The copyright surely applies whether or not I put the
> FileCopyrightText there. The list is also just about always
> incomplete, further calling its use into question. Not to mention that
> it is annoying book keeping of information that is already available
> in git.
>
> Can someone shed some light on this?
>

It is part of REUSE/SPDX policy for handling attribution. The name of
this label is misleading, but what it does is important.

The systemd project's adoption of SPDX-License-Identifier mimicked the
Linux kernel's pattern, but the Linux kernel did not drop the rest of
the header. That said, as a systemd contributor, I refused to have my
attribution statements erased from the files I substantially
contributed to, so they stand today in the sources.

I will also note that I am not a fan of REUSE overall, but I'm even
less of a fan of dropping attribution from sources.



-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!