A short history of Gentoo copyright

Author

Michał Górny

Date
2018-05-18
Version
1.0

Contents

Preamble

As part of the recent effort into forming a new copyright policy for Gentoo, a research into the historical status has been conducted. We've tried to establish all the key events regarding the topic, as well as the reasoning behind the existing policy. I would like to shortly note the history based on the evidence discovered by Robin H. Johnson, Ulrich Müller and myself.

Relicensing to GPL-2

The Gentoo ebuild repository was initially licensed ‘GPL, v2 or later’, as seen in the header above. The ‘or later’ part was removed later. The first commit using pure ‘GPL v2’ seems to be dated 2002-02-09 4. It uses the following heading:

# Copyright 1999-2002 Gentoo Technologies, Inc.
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2

Afterwards, the ebuilds were slowly transitioned to new license as part of other changes. It seems that major relicensing of ebuilds was done in October of 2002 but a handful of GPL-2+ ebuilds remained, and occassionally new ebuilds allowing newer GPL versions were committed. The last GPL-2+ ebuilds were cleaned up in 2012. Some of the auxiliary files (e.g. init.d scripts) still use GPL-2+ today.

The closest explanation preceding the relicensing seems to be Daniel Robbins' post from 2002-02-07 which states:

[...] It does allow me to tweak the GPL part of the license to be "v2 only", which has been something that I've been meaning to do for a while since I like the GPL but don't automatically trust future GPL licenses. [...] 5

Back then, GPL-3 was not even in the making for over three more years. Its final version has been published mid-2007 6. Gentoo has not yet made any decisive move with regards to GPL-3.

The future

Three main points were made in favor of copyright assignments so far:

  1. They allowed Gentoo Technologies to unilaterally change the license.

  2. They technically allowed Gentoo to pursue copyright violations for any of the code.

  3. They made code reuse simpler due to not requiring tracking of copyrights.

However, the points brought in the earlier sections make the Gentoo implementation of copyright assignment doubtful at least. It has caused us to reject some contributions (not a meaningful amount, though) and raised some doubt as to the actual copyright owners in our code. Most importantly, it has been pointed out that the full assignment as used by Gentoo is not permitted by the laws of most of the EU countries. This makes the status of code contributed by European developers unclear.

Those legal issues are not specific to Gentoo. They have resulted in a large number of projects creating various kinds of Contributor License Agreements 22. One of the most interesting variants is Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) 23. Technically, the old copyright forms could be replaced by such a document. However, all contributors would be required to sign it before contributing any copyrightable work. This is quite inconvenient, and other open source projects have already suffered loss of contributors for this precise reason (for one, I don't contribute to Google projects anymore).

The current copyright draft 19 aims to provide users the choice between two models: retaining copyright, or sublicensing to Gentoo Foundation via FLA. While this wouldn't give us the full coverage of copyright, it should provide a reasonable compromise between the benefits of copyright ownership and contributor's convenience and need for attribution.

References

1

[gentoo-x86] /header.txt; r1.1 (https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/header.txt?revision=1.1&view=markup)

2

Daniel Robbins, Re: [gentoo-dev] Why should copyright assignment be a requirement? (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/60630a3e1b5ba40c49fa65daadd45fbd)

3

Jon Portnoy, Re: [gentoo-dev] ebuild copyright attribution? (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/6754792cbe9763d249a0c4ee3d3f0602)

4

[gentoo-x86] /x11-misc/wmakerconf/wmakerconf-2.8.1.ebuild r1.1 (https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/x11-misc/wmakerconf/wmakerconf-2.8.1.ebuild?hideattic=0&revision=1.1&view=markup)

5

Daniel Robbins, Re: [gentoo-dev] Ebuild info: author, maintainer and copyrights (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/7a857384b8929cb930329eb59e27636a)

6

Brett Smith, A Quick Guide to GPLv3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html)

7

[gentoo] /xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/assignment.txt r1.1 (https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/assignment.txt?hideattic=0&revision=1.1&view=markup)

8

The Zynot Foundation (archived 2003-08-04) (http://web.archive.org/web/20030804132831/http://www.zynot.org:80/)

9

Jeffrey D. Myers, letter regarding Zynot copyright violation (https://web.archive.org/web/20031030042426/http://dev.gentoo.org/~drobbins/letter-to-zynot.txt)

10

Bug 55572 (tomk) - Retire: Tom Knight (tomk) (https://bugs.gentoo.org/55572#c7)

11

Kurt Lieber, [gentoo-trustees] copyright assignment doc (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-trustees/message/a8fed0ebe05befb8463a1f4b09c4ed09)

12

Deedra Waters, [gentoo-trustees] copyright forms and new devs (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-trustees/message/d860d16f85dc6cea23077b0ff8b979c0)

13

Sven Vermeulen, [gentoo-nfp] Status Update of the Gentoo Foundation (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-nfp/message/24adbb5301b339663963fa203da51cae)

14

[gentoo] /xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/copyright/assignment.txt r1.2 (https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/copyright/assignment.txt?hideattic=0&revision=1.2&view=markup)

15

[gentoo] /xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/copyright/assignment.txt (https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/devrel/copyright/assignment.txt?view=log&hideattic=0)

16

Bug 140286 - out of date copyright information (https://bugs.gentoo.org/140286#c2)

17

Foundation: Articles of Incorporation (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Articles_of_Incorporation)

18

[gentoo-x86] /app-accessibility/at-poke/at-poke-0.2.1.ebuild r1.3 (https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/app-accessibility/at-poke/at-poke-0.2.1.ebuild?hideattic=0&revision=1.3&view=markup)

19(1,2)

Richard Freeman, Alice Ferrazzi, Ulrich Müller, Robin H. Johnson: Copyright Policy [draft] (https://github.com/ulm/copyrightpolicy/blob/master/glep-copyrightpolicy.rst)

20

[gentoo-src] /portage/bin/repoman r1.32 (https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-src/portage/bin/repoman?revision=1.32&view=markup)

21

Daniel Robbins, Re: [gentoo-dev] Ebuild info: author, maintainer and copyrights (https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/8025ad7c83e29d0db66044b47b47bbaf)

22

Wikipedia: Contributor License Agreement # Users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#Users)

23

FSFE: Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) (https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/fla.en.html)