Open Compliance Summit

There have been some legal cases of FOSS developers enforcing their copyrights against companies. However, establishing the developer’s copyright ownership of FOSS projects only by copyright notice is difficult. On one hand, copyright notice may not refer to the real contributor of the source code. On another hand, copyright ownership can be assessed by the proportion and importance of the developer’s contribution instead of the copyright notice.

This talk will have a look at the thousands of copyright notices in Linux kernel. When and by whom are they created? How are they modified? Could they tell the correct copyright ownership? Not only the present situation of copyright notices but also the dynamic changes during the software evolution will be investigated. This talk aims at drawing the complete life cycle of the copyright notices buried in the large-scale source code.