Check licensing for the codebase; add appropriate license.

[nathan-at-least]

Issue by nathan-at-least
Tuesday Nov 25, 2014 at 21:17 GMT
Originally opened as Electric-Coin-Company/libzerocash#1

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[daira]

I notice that https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zerocashd/blob/master/COPYING still has only "Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Bitcoin Developers".

[daira]

Similarly for https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zerocashd/blob/master/README.md

[daira]

Also each source file has its own copyright notice. sigh.

[daira]

There is a script https://github.com/zcash/zcash/blob/zc.v0.11.2.latest/contrib/devtools/fix-copyright-headers.py that updates all the copyright headers to the current year. This is unfortunate because it means that if we change the headers, then there will be merge conflicts for every file each time we rebase after upstream has run the script.

What I would suggest is that we not change the copyright headers in our development and feature branches, but that each time we prepare a release, we run a version of fix-copyright-headers.py that fixes up the headers to say "Copyright (c) 2009-$CURRENTYEAR Bitcoin and Zcash Developers".

[Edit: updated URL and Zerocash -> Zcash.]

[daira]

Oh wait, that may still not work legally. The problem is that anything we put in a github repo is a published work that someone could create a derived work of. So any Zerocash contributors that are not also "Bitcoin Developers" will not have copyright on the files they modified in a development or feature branch, if the copyright notice on a file is interpreted to override the ones in COPYING and README.md.

(It doesn't matter very much because the license is MIT, so it's not as though this makes much difference to what people can do with the code.)

[nathan-at-least]

This is similar to #3.