python
Add information how to deal with incorporation external code (license, credits)
Describe the enhancement or feature you'd like The devguide does not contain information what a triager and core dev has to do when adding files or non-trivial portions of code from an external project with non-core dev contributors. There are a couple of things we need to check or do:
- Is the license compatible with PSFL?
- Include proper provenance and license information in file header or comment before the code
- Add license and origin to
Docs/license.rst - Give credits to original authors
- Properly document the provenance and license in commit message
Describe alternatives you've considered We should ask VanL for guidance, too.
Additional context See https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/95649 for a case that is missing proper license and provenance information.
Clarification: I'm not a lawyer and I don't feel qualified to write a DevGuide section for the problem. The bullet points in my initial comment are things I know or practices I followed in similar cases.
There's currently the accepting pull requests checklist that this would be related to, but I assume it would make sense as a separate document linked from there, since it applies to a fairly specific set of cases.
While I'm not the expert on Python's process, the above is similar to that which I've developed, documented and implemented for other large projects (particularly Spyder) in consultation with a copyright attorney, and am also familiar with this area through my continued work on PEP 639 and with SPDX helping maintain the FSF API, so I could help with this if a core dev or Van doesn't take this on. If I did draft something here, we would of course want to have Van review it, as well as yourself (or other core devs with expertise in this area).
