[darcs-users] Re: carrying license information?

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 07:33:28PM -0800, Isaac Jones wrote:
> Greetings!

Hi!

> I have no doubt that when users send patches to me, they agree with
> the license contained in my source tree.  However, IANAL and have no
> idea if it's actually legally the case that they are agreeing.
> 
> Would it be a good idea for darcs to carry license information, just
> as it carries the email address of the upstream author, and then
> prompt the user, during a 'darcs send' as to whether or not the user
> is licensing their patch under the given terms, and perhaps whether
> they sign copyright over to the upstream author[1].

I don't think this deserves a separate field, and suspect that it would be
better to stick it in the long comment field if it were desired.  This
would mean that you'd have to decide at record time rather than send time
what you wanted to say, but would also remove ambiguity, since the person
recording a patch is almost always the author (who actually has copyright),
while the one sending a patch may have pulled it from someone else.

If we implemented this as you suggest, it would seem to be much like the
"signed-off-by" notices used by the kernel developers, which don't indicate
that the signer owns the code, but that the signer has good reason to
believe the code is legal (i.e. either original, or signed-off-by a known
developer--with this being made explicit in the docs).  I don't see this as
being all that valuable to integrate with darcs.

What I'm thinking might serve your desires best would be to allow a
template for long comments... and perhaps have a way to indicate a boring
portion of the long comments that is optionally hidden in the interface.
Then one could put a license statement in the template, perhaps hidden with
a marker.  Maybe:

darcs record --long-comment-template=~/.licence

~/.license contains:
LICENSE
This code is license under GPL 2 or later, and I grant Zooko the right to
relicense it if he wishes.
EOF

Then we could perhaps run something like

darcs changes --boring-comment-initiator=LICENSE

which wouldn't display the portions of the long comments after "LICENSE".

I think this would do as much as I'd like, and might be useful for other
sorts of purposes.  In particular, the --boring-comment-initiator flag
might be used in a given project to separate out other sorts of
information.

I suppose having template for darcs send would also serve a similar
function, and could be used to stick a license into the email portion of a
patch bundle.

What neither of these do is to by default prompt users to add such
information, so it might not serve your desires of getting this info out of
rare contributors, and major contributors aren't likely to be an issue in
this respect.  But that nagging is precisely what others seem likely to
object to, which is why I'm thinking in terms of templates, which need to
be set up by hand.  This also addresses the issue someone raised that if
the license statement is added too automatically then it may lose its legal
meaning.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net