Re: Further suggestions for Copyright Notices

[Rik]

On 01/07/2020 09:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:

Subject:

Re: Maintaining copyright notices

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"John W. Eaton" <address@hidden>

Date:

01/06/2020 09:52 PM

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On 1/3/20 7:10 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

To minimize the difficulty of maintaining the copyright notices, I would like to change Octave's sources to use what is described here

https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html

> [...]
>

I'm ready to make these changes prior to the 6.1 release but would like to hear from others before proceeding.

Thanks for the feedback.

I checked in the following changesets to use "The Octave Developers" for copyright notices in most source files and to update the copyright year for those to 2020:

  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/b442ec6dda5c
  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/1891570abac8

As stated in the commit message for the first changesetI skipped most of the files in the directories

  doc
  libgui/qterminal
  liboctave/external
  m4

I'm not sure what to do with the copyright and authorship of the Octave manual and, although we have modified some of them, the files in the other directories are mostly imported from elsewhere so I don't know that we should place the Octave copyright on them.

I agree with external code being excluded.  For the manual, what are the arguments against using the same system as for the code (consistency normally being a good thing)?

I used a script to generate the initial COPYRIGHT.md file.  I'm not sure that it's necessary to add it to the hg archive, but I can share it if there is interest.

If it is a one-off script needed to create the first version then it doesn't require version control.  If it is a script that will need to be executed every time there is a new release then that should go somewhere in the hg archive, maybe build-aux/?

Comments and further suggestions?

I would change the visual formatting of the Copyright block.  Below is the current format as taken from wilkinson.m.

## Copyright (C) 1999-2020 The Octave Project Developers
##
## See the file COPYRIGHT.md in the top-level directory of this distribution
## or <https://octave.org/COPYRIGHT.html/>.
##
##
## This file is part of Octave.
##
## Octave is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
## the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
## (at your option) any later version.
##
## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
## GNU General Public License for more details.
##
## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
## <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

## -*- texinfo -*-d
## @deftypefn {} {} wilkinson (@var{n})
## Return the Wilkinson matrix of order @var{n}.
##
## Wilkinson matrices are symmetric and tridiagonal with pairs of nearly, but
## not exactly, equal eigenvalues.  They are useful in testing the behavior and
## performance of eigenvalue solvers.
##
## @seealso{rosser, eig}
## @end deftypefn

## Author: Peter Ekberg
##         (peda)

function retval = wilkinson (n)

  if (nargin != 1)
    print_usage ();
  endif

As a programmer, I acknowledge the Copyright but I don't want to be distracted by it.  I would like to be able to immediately find where the code (my interest) begins.  To do that, I would set off the Copyright block in some manner from the rest of the file.  A common demarcation might be a line of 80 '#' characters.  If this was chosen then I would probably want that same line at the start of the file so that the entire Copyright block is surrounded.  Another demarcation might be two newlines after the end of the GPL clauses.  Although copyright and license are different, I don't see the need to distinguish them so strongly by having two newlines after the copyright and before the GPL clauses.  I would take this back down to one newline.

Also, this file happens to still have an "Author:" line.  Is it still planned to remove these before the 6.1 release?

--Rik