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He’s not implying that the space in the file is somehow limited. He’s pointing towards the same problem you are guesturing at in your second paragraph: that “li

He’s not implying that the space in the file is somehow limited. He’s pointing towards the same problem you are guesturing at in your second paragraph: that “listing” copyright holders really only makes sense when there is only one of them. Any more than that and you raise the legal question: who exactly has copyright on which parts? When there is more than one copyright holder, you absolutely need language to address that in the license. MIT license has no such language. Apache 2.0 addresses it by requiring CLAs, per-file copyright and attribution notices, etc. Blue Oak addresses it by using terms that start with "Each contributor".

foldr 8y ago
"Each contributor" is meaningless unless you have a list of contributors. If you have a list of contributors, you may as well put it in the license.
- velcrovan 8y ago
  No, it's not meaningless. It refers to everyone who has contributed. According to the Blue Oak license, everyone who has contributed licenses their contribution according to the terms of that license. There’s no need to identify them separately, not for licensing purposes anyway. If their code is in there, it’s covered by the license.
  - foldr 8y ago
    No, not unless you have a record that they agreed to contribute their code under that license. There's no magic wording in a license file that can make it possible to get by without keeping a proper record of contributors.
    - velcrovan 8y ago
      Yes there is such magic wording. You can't use the software without agreeing to the license. It is obviously the case that anyone who contributes is a user of the software. Thus all contributors are bound by the license terms whether or not their names are added to any list. If any contributor were to assert a violation of their copyright, they would themselves be in violation of the license.
      - foldr 8y ago
        Yeah, but you don't know that the person who contributed the code actually holds the copyright to it unless you keep proper records. It's also unclear whether people do in fact automatically agree to all the terms of a license merely by, say, submitting a pull request. Even if the license asserts that this is the case, not all terms of a license are necessarily legally meaningful or enforceable in any given jurisdiction. There isn't a huge amount of case law on this kind of thing, as far as I'm aware. The bottom line is that any kind of open source license has copyright as its foundation. If you don't have a proper record of the copyright holders, then the license doesn't mean much. You need to know exactly who has the copyright to the code and exactly who is agreeing to release the code under a given license.

foldr 8y ago

"Each contributor" is meaningless unless you have a list of contributors. If you have a list of contributors, you may as well put it in the license.

velcrovan 8y ago
No, it's not meaningless. It refers to everyone who has contributed. According to the Blue Oak license, everyone who has contributed licenses their contribution according to the terms of that license. There’s no need to identify them separately, not for licensing purposes anyway. If their code is in there, it’s covered by the license.
- foldr 8y ago
  No, not unless you have a record that they agreed to contribute their code under that license. There's no magic wording in a license file that can make it possible to get by without keeping a proper record of contributors.
  - velcrovan 8y ago
    Yes there is such magic wording. You can't use the software without agreeing to the license. It is obviously the case that anyone who contributes is a user of the software. Thus all contributors are bound by the license terms whether or not their names are added to any list. If any contributor were to assert a violation of their copyright, they would themselves be in violation of the license.
    - foldr 8y ago
      Yeah, but you don't know that the person who contributed the code actually holds the copyright to it unless you keep proper records. It's also unclear whether people do in fact automatically agree to all the terms of a license merely by, say, submitting a pull request. Even if the license asserts that this is the case, not all terms of a license are necessarily legally meaningful or enforceable in any given jurisdiction. There isn't a huge amount of case law on this kind of thing, as far as I'm aware. The bottom line is that any kind of open source license has copyright as its foundation. If you don't have a proper record of the copyright holders, then the license doesn't mean much. You need to know exactly who has the copyright to the code and exactly who is agreeing to release the code under a given license.