Fixes of copyright headers: Should we downport them?

[Jones, Philip]

As a user of OpenJDK, copyright headers are very important.

We need to go through a clearance process that scans all files for licenses etc. If a copyright header is missing or incorrect it can mean that effectively the  code becomes unusable by many.

A concrete example:

https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk-updates/jdk11u/file/00f8f9fcdc3a/src/jdk.crypto.cryptoki/share/native/libj2pkcs11/pkcs11.h

This file was added via https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=JDK-8080462

JDK-8080462 : Update SunPKCS11 provider with PKCS11 v2.40 support

And has added files that have an unclear copyright (the copyright is a link to an unversioned online file that may change and that is still somewhat unclear)

Philip

-----Original Message-----
From: jdk-updates-dev <jdk-updates-dev-bounces at openjdk.java.net> On Behalf Of Gil Tene
Sent: 26 March 2020 07:08
To: Aleksey Shipilev <shade at redhat.com>
Cc: jdk-updates-dev at openjdk.java.net
Subject: Re: Fixes of copyright headers: Should we downport them?



Sent from my iPad

On Mar 25, 2020, at 11:26 PM, Aleksey Shipilev <shade at redhat.com> wrote:

On 3/19/20 4:39 PM, Lindenmaier, Goetz wrote:
Hi Andrew,

There are a row of changes fixing copyrights downported by Oracle to 11.0.8, similar to this one:
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8220414

See also
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/issues/?filter=38639

I'd consider them pretty pointless given the rules you set.
So should we skip them?
If so, I would mark them all as openjdk-na.
(In my opinion we should downport them, but I'll follow your advice.)

Not Andrew, but I believe copyright headers are important enough to consider for backports. If the reverse was true, we would not care about rejected hunks in copyright lines during the normal backports.

Umm...

It literally says ”DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.”

So unless we are copying the entire file from upstream intact (replacing the entirety of the old copyrighted file in 11u with a new copyrighted file copied from upstream), I don’t think anyone other than Oracle should be messing with the existing Oracle copyright notice text in 11u code.

And if we do replace the file in its entirety (and e.g. the only difference between the two is the copyright text) we’d likely want the change records to indicate a removal of the old file and an addition of a new replacement file, and not just a change of the one or two lines of copyright text that differed between the two.

If you can get Oracle to do the backport of the copyright changes to 11u, that’s fine. But otherwise, I’d leave them as they are.

I know this may seem pedantic, but copyrights and notices matter, and they carry a lot of implications. We all depend on the code in the updates projects not messing with them.


--
Thanks,
-Aleksey
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