Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v5 01/28] qapi: Document type-safety considerations

[Markus Armbruster]

Copyright note question, copying Michael.

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> On 03/25/2015 12:31 PM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>> Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Go into more details about the various types of valid expressions
>>> in a qapi schema, including tweaks to document fixes being done
>>> later in the current patch series.  Also fix some stale and missing
>>> documentation in the QMP specification.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
>>>
>>> ---
>>>
>>> I'm not sure if it is okay to assert GPLv2+ licensing without an
>>> explicit Copyright, but as I am not the original author, I don't
>>> know who to attribute any original Copyright to.  Advice?  Should
>>> I split the license addition to a separate patch?
>
> No thoughts to this question?

Missed it.

I wish we didn't need to clutter copyright and licensing boiler plate
everywhere, but I accept it's the prudent thing to do in a tree with so
many differently licensed parts.

Making GPLv2+ explicit is obviously fine, because anything without an
explicit licensing note is GPLv2+ (see ./LICENSE).  That leaves the
copyright part, as you say.

According to git-log, the file was created by Michael Roth.  git-blame
blames 219 out of 590 lines in current master on his initial commit.

$ git-blame -w master docs/qapi-code-gen.txt | cut -c 11-28 | sort | uniq -c | 
sort -nr
    219 Michael Roth
    124 Markus Armbruster
    116 Kevin Wolf
     95 Eric Blake
     21 Wenchao Xia
     10 Lluís Vilanova
      2 Stefan Weil
      2 Stefan Hajnoczi
      1 Benoît Canet

If you want to add a copyright note, I suggest to steal one from
Michael's work elsewhere, and update it for later major contributors.

Here's my stab at it:

    = How to use the QAPI code generator =

    Copyright IBM Corp. 2011
    Copyright (C) 2012-2015 Red Hat, Inc.

    Authors:
     Michael Roth <address@hidden>
     Kevin Wolf <address@hidden>
     Markus Armbruster <address@hidden>
     Eric Blake <address@hidden>

    This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2 or later.
    See the COPYING file in the top-level directory.

    == Introduction ==

    QAPI is a native C API within QEMU which provides management-level
    functionality to internal and external users. For external

The Authors paragraph is informational and could be omitted without
compromising the copyright note.

[...]