Re: notification requirements [was Re: MPL Alpha 1 Draft Released]

  On 8/23/10 6:50 AM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
>
> I think the more interesting question here is whether we should be 
> able to identify all the copyright holders for a particular piece of 
> code. As far as I can tell, that was the original reason for listing 
> "Contributors" in the MPL 1.1 header, so that you could go back later 
> and know exactly who has a copyright interest in that code. I think 
> it's much more important for the MPL 1.2 effort to decide whether this 
> is an important goal or not.
For what it is worth, I think on this particular point there seems to be 
some consensus that:

1) This language in the MPL 1.1 did not achieve the goal of identifying 
all the copyright holders for a given piece of code; we have hard data 
showing that a large number of small-c contributors ended up never 
listed as Contributors. (I believe I sent links to that effect to the 
list; please poke if you need me to resend.)

2) Modern development practices (better revision control systems, 
contributor agreements, and source code search tools, primarily) do a 
better job of this now, making it less important to have in the license.

Luis

-- 
Luis Villa, Mozilla Legal
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