GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 756359
Fix the copyright notice in the About dialog
Last modified: 2021-06-10 11:03:20 UTC
The "copyright" notice in the polari About dialog currently lists "© 2013 Red Hat, Inc." as the sole copyright holder for the application. This is not true unless all developers have assigned their copyright to Red Hat. As GNOME does not partake in copyright assignment as a project, I hope that this is a simple mistake which will be fixed. All contributors who have made a non-trivial contribution to the project hold the copyright for their work. There are exceptions in some countries where the employer holds the copyright for the work done as part of the employment agreement (which is why I assume Red Hat appears there at all), but not all contributors are Red Hat employees.
The following fix has been pushed: b52d74b app: Update copyright property in About
Created attachment 313225 [details] [review] app: Update copyright property in About Neither are all contributors employed by Red Hat anymore, nor is it still 2013 - update the copyright accordingly.
Hi Florian, thanks for looking at the issue! Unfortunately, "The Polari authors" is not a legal entity either so is equally wrong (although less aggregating). For documentation, we have everyone add themselves to the credits of each file and those are then shown in the copyright notice. For apps, an appropriate equivalent would be to scrape and collate the copyright notices from the headers in each file. I imagine that this can be partially scripted as they should be relatively consistent. The downside is that you'd be relying on people to declare their own claim on copyright. Alternatively, you could use git to get a list of committers, but this would be less accurate as some of those may have made trivial changes which are not copyrightable. Or, you could just give up on it altogether and go for "All contributions © 2013-2015 their respective authors, which can be found at https://git.gnome.org/browse/polari"
(In reply to Kat from comment #3) > Unfortunately, "The Polari authors" is not a legal entity either so is > equally wrong (although less aggregating). It's a pattern used by other GNOME apps though, including core apps. Feel free to provide a patch with a better phrasing for "everyone listed as author in the about dialog" ...
(In reply to Florian Müllner from comment #4) > (In reply to Kat from comment #3) > > Unfortunately, "The Polari authors" is not a legal entity either so is > > equally wrong (although less aggregating). > > It's a pattern used by other GNOME apps though, including core apps. Just because everyone else does it wrong, doesn't mean that polari needs to as well :) It's a legal issue because the copyright is mis-attributed right now. > Feel free to provide a patch with a better phrasing for "everyone listed as > author in the about dialog" ... Where is this wording seen?
(In reply to Kat from comment #5) > > Feel free to provide a patch with a better phrasing for "everyone listed as > > author in the about dialog" ... > > Where is this wording seen? Nowhere, it's what was meant by "Polari authors". I'm seeing that the list of contributors in the about dialog is updated at least for stable releases and contains everyone who arguably made a non-trivial contribution (it's erring heavily on the side of inclusion).
Ah, I see what you mean. As you're making the entries manually anyway, why not instead of doing: Florian Müllner William Jon McCann Carlos Soriano … Do: Florian Müllner (© 2013–2015) William Jon McCann (© 2013) Carlos Soriano (© 2013–2014) … The copyright notice really should have dates and names, so that would be an ideal solution. I'd be happy to provide a patch for that. The downside is that, for example, an employer might technically hold the copyright for the code while the employee is the author. In those cases, we would need to do something which would look more like (just as an example, I don't know what your employment contract says :) ): Florian Müllner (2013–2015) Red Hat Inc. (© 2013–2015) But in that case, the other way to look at it is that they really are a financial contributor to the project as they're paying the developer. What do you think?
(In reply to Kat from comment #7) > In those cases, we would need to do > something which would look more like (just as an example, I don't know what > your employment contract says :) ): Red Hat allows its employees to maintain the copyright on code they write during working hours, but it's common for employees to voluntarily assign copyright to Red Hat (I'm fine with that, as should be obvious from the original (outdated) copyright notice). Jon also was a Red Hat employee at the time of his contributions, so we'd need to ask him. I don't think Giovanni was at the time, and I'm not sure about Carlos Garnacho. Both Bastian and Carlos Soriano were unaffiliated, I don't know for Jonas and Kunaal (and Cody Welsh who will be added to the list)
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Polari, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/polari/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.