Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/912355/

The practice of requiring copyright assignments for contributions to
free-software projects has been in decline for years; the GNU Binutils
project may be the
latest domino to fall in that regard. The Linux kernel project,
unlike some others, has always allowed contributors to retain their copyrights,
resulting in a code base that has widely distributed ownership. In such a
project, who owns the copyright to a given piece of code is not always
obvious. Some
developers (or their employers) are insistent about the placement of
copyright notices in the code to document their ownership of parts of the
kernel. A series of recent discussions within the Btrfs subsystem, though,
has made it clear that there is no project-wide policy on when these
notices are warranted — or even acceptable.