Re: [RFC PATCH] CODING_STYLE: Establish a policy with regards to copyright notices

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 28.01.2026 10:09, Alejandro Vallejo wrote:
> The refinement also applies to the second bullet point, so I can add it as a
> separate paragraph stating existing notices are to never be modified and only
> removed with the express consent of the current holder(s).

That's interesting, as it may be getting increasingly difficult in practice.
Often you can't get hold of the holder(s), to the degree that - as we're all
growing older - at some point they may not be there at all anymore. Yet if
not having such notices is going to be a goal of the project, retaining some
indefinitely can't be the intention either.

> Do you have a take for/against moving all existing notices to a separate 
> NOTICES
> file (a-la Apache). The existing file for them (in httpd) looks like this, so
> they took the liberty to rewording the banners to be more digestible in single
> file inclusion.
> 
>       Apache HTTP Server
>       Copyright 2026 The Apache Software Foundation.
> 
>       This product includes software developed at
>       The Apache Software Foundation (https://www.apache.org/).
> 
>       Portions of this software were developed at the National Center
>       for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of
>       Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
> 
>       This software contains code derived from the RSA Data Security
>       Inc. MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm, including various
>       modifications by Spyglass Inc., Carnegie Mellon University, and
>       Bell Communications Research, Inc (Bellcore).
> 
>       This software contains code derived from the PCRE library pcreposix.c
>       source code, written by Philip Hazel, Copyright 1997-2004
>       by the University of Cambridge, England.
> 
> It'd blur the scope of existing holders, but code moves and so do their
> contributions. Keeping a banner on a file after a refactor is just
> misattribution.
> 
> ------------------
> 
> In short. There's 1 question in 2 forms I'd like to have an answer to from a
> core maintainers.
> 
> Would you be willing to ack a change along these lines?
>   1. to a Copyright Notice policy within CODING_STYLE.

Likely, once we've agreed on suitable wording.

>   2. to the relegation of existing notices to a NOTICES file in the style of
>      Apache. Apache in particular mandates the file not be touched unless
>      absolutely required for legal reasons.

Very unlikely. While likely I wouldn't veto it, I don't like such moving around
of things. If we want to get them out of the source files, they should be
dropped altogether.

Jan