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Auto merge of #43498 - joshtriplett:fix-notices, r=aturon
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Copyright/license headers

(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.
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bors committed Jul 27, 2017
2 parents f60d373 + f1de27f commit 0565653
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41 changes: 10 additions & 31 deletions COPYRIGHT
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -6,16 +6,17 @@ terms.

Longer version:

The Rust Project is copyright 2010, The Rust Project
Developers.
Copyrights in the Rust project are retained by their contributors. No
copyright assignment is required to contribute to the Rust project.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0
<LICENSE-APACHE or
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0> or the MIT
license <LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>,
at your option. All files in the project carrying such
notice may not be copied, modified, or distributed except
according to those terms.
Some files include explicit copyright notices and/or license notices.
For full authorship information, see AUTHORS.txt and the version control
history.

Except as otherwise noted (below and/or in individual files), Rust is
licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 <LICENSE-APACHE> or
<http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0> or the MIT license
<LICENSE-MIT> or <http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>, at your option.


The Rust Project includes packages written by third parties.
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -282,25 +283,3 @@ their own copyright notices and license terms:
NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE
USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY
OF SUCH DAMAGE.

* Additional copyright may be retained by contributors other
than Mozilla, the Rust Project Developers, or the parties
enumerated in this file. Such copyright can be determined
on a case-by-case basis by examining the author of each
portion of a file in the revision-control commit records
of the project, or by consulting representative comments
claiming copyright ownership for a file.

For example, the text:

"Copyright (c) 2011 Google Inc."

appears in some files, and these files thereby denote
that their author and copyright-holder is Google Inc.

In all such cases, the absence of explicit licensing text
indicates that the contributor chose to license their work
for distribution under identical terms to those Mozilla
has chosen for the collective work, enumerated at the top
of this file. The only difference is the retention of
copyright itself, held by the contributor.
2 changes: 0 additions & 2 deletions LICENSE-MIT
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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