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LICENSE-MIT: Remove inaccurate (misattributed) copyright notice
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LICENSE-MIT contains the line "Copyright (c) 2015 The Rust Project
Developers", which implies that an entity called "The Rust Project
Developers" holds copyrights in Rust. Rust contributors retain
their copyrights, and do not assign them to anyone by contributing.
Remove the inaccurate notice.
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@joshtriplett
joshtriplett committed Jul 26, 2017
1 parent d02fb3b commit 2a8807e
Showing 1 changed file with 0 additions and 2 deletions.
2 changes: 0 additions & 2 deletions LICENSE-MIT
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Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,5 +1,3 @@
Copyright (c) 2010 The Rust Project Developers

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any
person obtaining a copy of this software and associated
documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the
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8 comments on commit 2a8807e

@gurry
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@gurry gurry commented on 2a8807e Apr 2, 2018

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The text still says "above copyright notice" referring to a non-existent notice. Should this also be removed?

@joshtriplett
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Editing the text of the license itself would be a Bad Idea. I don't think this is an issue.

@gurry
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@gurry gurry commented on 2a8807e Apr 2, 2018

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But is it legally coherent now when the text refers to a non-existent entity? I'm trying to use some code form rustlang in my own crate, and I'm not sure if referring to the missing copyright notices in my own reproduction of the text will perpetuate this anomaly further or not.

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Intent matters, and people will interpret "the above copyright notice and this permission notice" as "preserve this whole file verbatim".

@gurry
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@gurry gurry commented on 2a8807e Apr 3, 2018 •
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I understand what you mean, but I'm presuming legal language needs to be semantically correct in order to be binding. So the question is, does this small kink render the whole license legally unenforceable and, because of that, completely useless. Maybe a lawyer needs to be consulted about this.

Please see this discussion also: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/is-it-okay-to-copy-paste-code-from-rustlang/16576

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I'm not a lawyer nor am I offering legal advice. However, I do work with FOSS licenses and their interpretation/compatibility/etc professionally. And I would accept this myself without even the slightest hiccup.

As a general rule, things like that don't render whole licenses unenforceable or useless, they're just interpreted in the way that makes the most sense.

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@gurry gurry commented on 2a8807e Apr 3, 2018

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Okay. Makes sense Josh. If you have experience with this stuff and it doesn't cause problems in practice, then it's fine. I'll go ahead and comply with this license as it is in my own crate (see linked discussion). Thanks :)

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It's true that copyright notices aren't required to assert copyright and they're mostly informative.

However, in this particular case, the licence (MIT) specifically requires that the copyright notice be preserved. This commit has violated the terms of the licence.

Common wisdom about copyright notices doesn't apply here. One could imagine a hypothetical licence that requires each copy of the program to include the following string of text: "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". It doesn't matter that this phrase has no special legal meaning. It just needs to be included.

Side note: There's actually a real-life licence that requires distributors to preserve completely arbitrary strings of text: GNU Free Documentation License, it calls these strings "Invariant Sections".

Also, it's not true that copyright notices can only name legal entities. For example, it's very common to put "and contributors" in there.

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