Hi, INAL but the copyright notice in the header is just a claim and may not reflect who actually has copyright. It doesn’t mean that that person or company owns the copyright on the entire file. With a company it’s usually easier as employment contracts say the company owns the copyright of works produced by their workers. With individuals it gets more complex as they may or may not own the copyright or may be unaware who does. (Worse case scenario see [1], where an employee was forced to implement an idea he had outside of work unpaid and had to pay costs)
Each person who made changes would own copyright (or for their company) automatically on their work. Especially in this case where I believe the project had no ICLAs or agreements in place with it contributors about copyright. If you a more qualified opinion please ask on legal-discuss. We know this is currently an issue, so I would you just note that it is in the work in progress DISCLAIMER for the initial release, so that way people who use the release are aware of it. Given the licensing terms of the files it’s not an issue that would stop most people from using the software. What Brennan and Adam are suggesting sounds like a good process to me. Identifying all of the contributors that don’t have ICLA is useful, it’s also good to has some ideas of the size of their contribution. For large contributions it would be best to get an ICLA from the individual, this may be a lot of work, and in some cases it may not be possible. That fine we can deal with that as needed and this shouldn’t hold up a release or graduation (as long as progress is being made) and can be done in parallel. A release could have been made at any point in the last several months, the only barriers to not do so that are ones you are putting up for yourself. A release doesn’t have to be perfect, in fact it doesn’t even have to work as far as the ASF is concerned. A good goal to aim for it to make each release better than the last, and release frequently rather than trying to make a perfect release. Thanks, Justin 1. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-08-05-0208050013-story.html
