Create LICENSE.md

[timparsons]

No description provided.

[eawoods]

As per the instructions at the bottom (APPENDIX, how to apply the Apache license to your own work): we can and should create a copyright page with the suggested text to go along with this. It could be linked to the word "Copyright" in the footer.

Also, should the appendix stay in there as instructions for contributors of derivative works, or removed? It looks as if we just dropped in a boilerplate and forgot to delete the instructions for using it, so maybe if it is left intentionally it could be labeled "instructions for contributors" or some such. I've never seen that on a license before, and would put it on the contributors page instead (when we have one).

[nickpalladino]

@eawoods The APPENDIX section is part of the license instructing how the source code files should be marked in the headers. I think we should add headers to the source files in the least painful way after we figure out who the copyright holder is.

[timparsons]

@eawoods Agreed with what @nickpalladino said. The APPENDIX is a part of the license file, and not boilerplate. It's intended to inform contributors as to how to add copyright to files, as well as a reference to the license. I cross referenced with a number of other Apache 2.0 licensed projects including Micronaut, Apahce Kafka, and Apache Spark. They all contain the same APPENDIX.

When looking at individual files for these projects, they had either copyright text directly in the (see Micronaut), or reference to a copyright (see Apache projects).

Apache projects:

Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
(the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Micronaut:

Copyright 2017-2020 original authors

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

As far as who owns the copyright of the BI software, I don't know the answer to that, however, the way Micronaut approached it does leave it more flexible for contributions directly from BI as well as from outside contributors.

In regards to getting the header added to our files in a painless way, Intellij has support for this, and it can be done en masse for all existing files. Intellij can also be configured to have this done on creation of new files (not sure about Emacs).

[eawoods]

If I am understanding the comments about proper application, this line should read "Copyright 2020 Breeding Insight" (or USDA or Cornell or whomever) and the paragraph and line beginning with "APPENDIX" could be removed.
This line and the text below it could also be moved to source code.

See application of this license here without appendix, one of those I was referencing: https://swagger.io/license/

So it seems like it could be done either way, with the boilerplate appendix in the license file or elsewhere.

didn't mean to spawn a review with my comment

[ctucker3]

Not sure my review counts for much on this topic. But I see the files there and see it is Apache v2, so that seems good to me!

[nickpalladino]

So are you planning to use the apache style file headers since you created the NOTICE file?

[timparsons]

So are you planning to use the apache style file headers since you created the NOTICE file?

@nickpalladino Yes. When looking at the Apache approach, it was nicer in that there's only one place to update the copyright from year to year

[nickpalladino]

So are you planning to use the apache style file headers since you created the NOTICE file?

@nickpalladino Yes. When looking at the Apache approach, it was nicer in that there's only one place to update the copyright from year to year

Ya, agree. Wouldn't the NOTICE just contain the copyright info and not the source code license header?

[dmeidlin]

This looks good to me.