[PROJ] OSGeo incubation status

[Even Rouault]

On mardi 10 septembre 2019 08:15:53 CEST Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> On 9/10/19 8:08 AM, Kristian Evers wrote:
> > We have a bunch of files without a license header present. The copyright
> > holder is inferred from the git log. Should we add headers to those
> > files? 

Adding a copyright & license header on behalf of someone else is probably 
something we should not do without their explicit consent. As the project has 
a general COPYING file, that should cover those cases. I remember having seen 
discussions on the Incubation mailing list where it was said that having a 
per-file copyright&license information wasn't an obligation (I believe OSGeo 
received legal advice regarding this, but my memory can be wrong)

That said, I'd find it a good practice to require new contributions to have an 
explicit header.

> > Also, in many files substantial work has been done by several
> > developers, even though only one is stated as the copyright holder. I
> > assume because the developer has forgotten to add their name in the
> > header. We can also infer those from git, but is that something that we
> > ought to do?
> 
> You'll have assess whether the changes are eligible for copyright from
> the diff, as trivial changes aren't copyrightable.
> 
> You don't have to add every author of changes, if they don't add a
> copyright statement of their own, they may have just chosen to wave
> their claim and implicitly grant it to the project.

I'm in line with Bas here. Retracing all activity in each file and determine 
which one is worth being copyrighted would be a lot of work.

I believe one of the main purposes of this provenance review is to check that 
we don't have files explicitly under a proprietary license or under an 
incompatible open source license (that's how I perceive
GDAL's https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/master/gdal/PROVENANCE.TXT was 
established)

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