Some files are missing the license header

[matei-radu]

While working on #96 I stumbled across some files that are missing the usual copyright and license header (e.g. getDependencyConfig, logger).

In general, are contributors encouraged to be proactive about it and add the header when they happen to be working on these files or do we have any specific policy/strategy for dealing with this type of things?

[thymikee]

I don't think we actually need copyright headers in this project. They were added when it was moved to Facebook repository.

@cpojer @JoelMarcey @hramos can you advise?

[cpojer]

Could we keep using the FB copyright header for the cli, given that this project is the primary entry point for RN and the code was part of RN itself and mostly written by FB engineers in the past? I think removing them would not be right, technically.

[thymikee]

Removing would certainly be wrong. We could omit them in new files, but then again – it raises confusion. I'm good with adding the copyright, just would be nice to adapt a script to enforce it (either copy the one from Jest or use eslint plugin header)

[matei-radu]

I have no legal background to express an opinion on whether the copyright notice should be there or not, but I think it wouldn't do any harm to mention just the license used (MIT in our case).

EDIT: the LICENSE file has the react-native-community as the copyright holder, so we might have to use that instead of Facebook in the heading.

[grabbou]

I think it makes sense to leave current copyrighted files "as is" and just add a React Native Community one to new files or the ones we refactor in a major way.

There are files that were done by Facebook engineers, but there are also files that were created in rnpm (e.g. core/link/unlik) too. I wouldn't add Facebook copyright to files created by the community.

I hope that makes sense.

I think it would be good to keep this written down in the guidelines as other projects will be running into this use-case too.

CC: @kelset

[kelset]

Yeah, that's actually an interesting question.

I'm not sure what actual legal value the headers have "over" the License.md file hosted in each repo, but ideally for now let's keep the headers.

[JoelMarcey]

Was this originally a Facebook project? Or has this always been a community project? Normally for code headers, we do something like:

Copyright (c) Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates.

This source code is licensed under the MIT license found in the
LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.

[thymikee]

@JoelMarcey community -> FB -> community (it's funny right? :D )

[grabbou]

It's a mix. It was part of Facebook project and then, I added non-Facebook code here. It's all extracted here now. It's worth mentioning that non-Facebook copyrighted code received SLA-signed contributions later too.

[JoelMarcey]

IANAL, but my impression would be that given that this is no longer a Facebook managed project, that any original code with the FB license headers should remain, updates should have whatever license header underneath that. New code should have whatever license header you use now. But I will verify.

[grabbou]

@JoelMarcey any update on that? We've been following that approach so far.

[JoelMarcey]

@grabbou Just pinged an email. Should know today. Sorry for the delay.

[matei-radu]

Do we have any updates on this?

[thymikee]

Ping @JoelMarcey :)

[JoelMarcey]

Oh sorry - yep. What I said looks to be correct. So if you have been following that approach, please continue to do so.