Copyright/license headers

[joshtriplett]

(As discussed with @aturon and @est31. CC @rust-lang/core.)

Currently, rust-lang/rust includes notices that say things like

The Rust Project is copyright 2010, The Rust Project
Developers.

or

Copyright (c) 2010 The Rust Project Developers

or

// Copyright 2017 The Rust Project Developers. See the COPYRIGHT
// file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at
// http://rust-lang.org/COPYRIGHT.

These notices aren't accurate. "Copyright YYYY Some Name" has a specific legal meaning, and "The Rust Project Developers" isn't a legal entity. In practice, the actual legal structure is that all Rust contributors retain their copyrights when contributing to Rust, and just license them under MIT/Apache-2.0. Our legal notices should reflect that.

This came up because of RFC 2044, which proposed fixing this for the RFC repository. That effort started out by copying the rust-lang/rust notices, propagating this issue.

Based on discussion with @aturon, the two of us propose the following:

• Delete the per-file notices entirely, for any files licensed under the standard terms. (Keep notices for anything that's not MIT/Apache-2.0.)
  • An alternative to that would be to just delete the first paragraph of the standard notice, and keep the second paragraph that points to the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses.
• Delete the first paragraph of LICENSE-MIT (the inaccurate pseudo-copyright line), leaving only the text of the MIT license.
• Edit the COPYRIGHT file to more accurately describe the situation (changing the pseudo-copyright line immediately under "longer version", and editing the text that starts with "additional copyright may be ...", to just always state that copyrights are retained by the Rust contributors, and licensed under MIT/Apache-2.0 (with the exceptions to that explicitly noted in that file).

If @rust-lang/core is fine with this proposal, I'd be happy to provide a pull request with the proposed fixes.

[aturon]

Per the core team meeting today, everyone is on board. PR welcome!

[est31]

I don't want to file a PR for this, so anyone please go ahead!

[rust-highfive]

r? @alexcrichton

(rust_highfive has picked a reviewer for you, use r? to override)

[joshtriplett]

For a first pass, I've attached a pull request that addresses LICENSE-MIT and COPYRIGHT. If this looks good, we can work on dropping the individual file notices separately.

(Edit: based on the wrong branch, rebasing.)

[est31]

I think for the RFC repo I'll replace the top paragraph with This file is subject to copyright. See the COPYRIGHT file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at http://rust-lang.org/COPYRIGHT..

[joshtriplett]

@est31 I think the intention is to avoid having notices in individual files at all, at least in rust-lang/rust.

[aturon]

This looks great! Thanks @joshtriplett

@bors: r+ rollup

[bors]

📌 Commit f1de27f has been approved by aturon

[est31]

If you include the "No copyright assignment is required" sentence, you should also talk about what is required, namely that by contributing, you agree to license the content under the given licenses and assert that you have the legal authority to license the content, or the content was given to you by a third party... or something like that.

[est31]

I'd just remove the sentence.

[joshtriplett]

That's typically implicit when contributing to an Open Source project. Most projects don't state that explicitly. And I would suggest that we avoid explicitly writing language like "by contributing ... you agree ...", because that starts to look more like a contract or CLA.

Rust doesn't use anything like the DCO, either.

[est31]

I think the intention is to avoid having notices in individual files at all

I think that's pretty bad, because it would then open the gates for discussion on which part of the source code is licensed and which one is only given to people for reference. Like idk individual tests from the testsuite. They are not part of the rust compiler.

I'm against omitting license headers entirely.

[joshtriplett]

@est31 There shouldn't be any code that isn't licensed accordingly; if there were tests that were not appropriately licensed, they'd need to be removed. To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any such issues in the repository.

Nonetheless, in the interests of not bikeshedding this, it'd also be fine to keep the license notices, and just drop the inaccurate copyright paragraphs. I really don't care that much between those two options; it's up to the core team.

[aturon]

I think that's pretty bad, because it would then open the gates for discussion on which part of the source code is licensed and which one is only given to people for reference. Like idk individual tests from the testsuite. They are not part of the rust compiler.

I'm against omitting license headers entirely.

The legal guidance we've received suggests that these notices aren't serving any purpose; what matters is the top-level content being revised here, which requires an explicit opt-out of the standard licensing.

[joshtriplett]

rust-lang/cargo#4331

[bors]

⌛ Testing commit f1de27f with merge 0565653...

[steveklabnik]

A related ticket #39897

[bors]

☀️ Test successful - status-appveyor, status-travis
Approved by: aturon
Pushing 0565653 to master...

[wking]

I'm having trouble squaring this removal with the “The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included…” sentence below. @joshtriplett, do you think that will be a problem, now that there is no longer an above copyright notice?

[joshtriplett]

I don't believe so, no. The requirement is to reproduce what's there; if something isn't there you don't need to reproduce it.