Message12382

Jim:

IANAL but it appears the "real" license you grant is the one you choose as "initial" and the PSF form adds an extra permission the lawyers advise is necessary. When I signed my form I chose the Apache license, without too much thought. (I slightly favour the academic one now.) These pages explain better than I can:

https://www.python.org/psf/contrib/

https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicenseFaq#Contributing_Code_to_Python

In the case of a patch, the FAQ says that your personal copyright should be expressed in the patch. I think this means in the commit message. That addition to the FAQ comes long after this discussion: https://grokbase.com/t/python/python-dev/113etjebve/copyright-notices which I found helpful about patches.

We haven't normally added copyright notices to source files, beyond "(c) Jython Developers", or at all to patches, and I do not see it done much in CPython either. So practice seems to differ from advice.  There is a long-ish license file in the codebase, I will add your name to the acknowledgements file, and the commit I make will be in your name, so as to attribute the work to you. I think we've argued that these are all "in the source" enough to connect the work to the license grant.

This is a pattern established before I joined the project. I've started to wonder recently if we're doing it exactly right. However, that's for the project to work out.

If you feel you want an explicit copyright statement, submit a patch with revised message or ask me to add a couple of lines on your behalf. I will be editing it a bit anyway.