glep-0076: Add initial text for motivation.

Signed-off-by: Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>

1 files changed, 26 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/glep-0076.rst b/glep-0076.rst
index cb4b1a6..569cc63 100644
--- a/glep-0076.rst
+++ b/glep-0076.rst
@@ -28,6 +28,32 @@ Abstract
 Motivation
 ==========
 
+In the past Gentoo developers signed contributor licensing agreements
+formally assigning copyright to the Gentoo Foundation, and copyright
+headers in individual files reflected this.  Then at some point in
+time these formal agreements no longer were being signed, but the
+headers remained, and were enshrined in policy.  This led to a
+situation where copyright ownership might be ambiguous.
+
+Also, the general policy to have Gentoo Foundation copyright notices
+caused an issue when Gentoo developers forked another project and
+hosted the fork on Gentoo infrastructure.  To comply with the previous
+policy the copyright notices were modified, which caused concerns
+with the project the files were forked from.  Our previous policy
+completely neglected the possibility that Gentoo might want to host
+files that were not created internally.
+
+Finally, since the early days of Gentoo new ideas around copyright
+licensing have become more popular, such as the FSFE's Fiduciary
+License Agreement, which takes a copyleft approach to copyright
+licensing, while also better complying with copyright laws in nations
+that have author's rights.
+
+The goal here was to create a policy that was both flexible enough to
+cover forks and situations where Gentoo would not own the majority of
+the copyright in a file, while also preserving our ability to formally
+own copyrights on as much of our works as possible.
+
 
 Specification
 =============