Supervisor: Patrick Georgi <>
Announced end of poll: End of May 21
Actual time poll closed:
Private poll (119 authorized voters)
Actual votes cast: 59
Number of winning choices:
Condorcet completion rule:    (What is this?)
Minimax
Schulze/Beatpath/CSSD
CIVS Ranked Pairs
MAM
Condorcet-IRV

Poll description

The coreboot project has had issues with copyright notices for a long time, and we’d like to start to address it. We currently don’t have any guide on when it’s ok to add a copyright, and when it isn’t. This and other issues like refactoring patches in gerrit lead to things like:

The copyright laws around the world differ, but it seems like most of them agree that copyright is specifically for acts of creativity. None of the above examples are creative, so that would exclude them from copyright protection.

Another issue is that we’d rather not have an ever-growing list of copyright notices at the top of each file. This has been addressed in other projects by having an AUTHORS file, and it’s been suggested that coreboot should follow this.

The AUTHORS file would contain the list of copyright holders, based on the existing copyright lines.

# This is the list of coreboot authors for copyright purposes.
#
# This does not necessarily list everyone who has contributed code, since in
# some cases, their employer may be the copyright holder.  To see the full list
# of contributors, see the revision history in source control.
Ronald G. Minnich 
Kyösti Mälkki 
SUSE LINUX AG
coresystems GmbH

All existing copyrights would be replaced with text “Copyright 2019 The coreboot project Authors.”

Arguments for replacing existing copyright lines with the AUTHORS file:

Result

1. Create an authors file and remove all existing copyright lines  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Create an authors file but leave existing copyright lines  loses to Create an authors file and remove all existing copyright lines by 40–15
3. Don’t create an authors file or change existing copyright lines  loses to Create an authors file and remove all existing copyright lines by 45–13, loses to Create an authors file but leave existing copyright lines by 30–18

For simplicity, some details of the poll result are not shown.  

Result details

  123
1. Create an authors file and remove all existing copyright lines   -40 45
2. Create an authors file but leave existing copyright lines   15 -30
3. Don’t create an authors file or change existing copyright lines   13 18 -

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