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Consider adding a copyright notice #105621

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SvizelPritula opened this issue Dec 12, 2022 · 3 comments
Open

Consider adding a copyright notice #105621

SvizelPritula opened this issue Dec 12, 2022 · 3 comments
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A-licensing Area: Compiler licensing A-meta Area: Issues & PRs about the rust-lang/rust repository itself T-core Relevant to the core team, which will review and decide on the PR/issue.

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@SvizelPritula
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SvizelPritula commented Dec 12, 2022

In #43498, the copyright notice reading "Copyright (c) 2015 The Rust Project
Developers" was stripped from the MIT license. This was done because there is no legal entity named "The Rust Project Developers" holding the copyright. However, this implies that groups who aren't legal entities don't deserve attribution, which I don't think is true. Also, this might be a license violation, since most rust developers never agreed to the removal. Therefore, I'd like to propose adding the following copyright notice:

Copyright <year> various Rust Project
Developers

This could also be interpreted as a violation of the license of pre-2015 code, as it's not exactly the copyright notice required, but that would also mean that changing the year is a license violation, yet most projects keep the year up-to-date.

@inquisitivecrystal inquisitivecrystal added T-core Relevant to the core team, which will review and decide on the PR/issue. A-meta Area: Issues & PRs about the rust-lang/rust repository itself A-licensing Area: Compiler licensing labels Dec 13, 2022
@njhanley
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njhanley commented Apr 7, 2023

This seems like a big issue. Without a copyright notice in LICENSE-MIT, there is no clear way to comply with the one condition of the license:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

This comment implies attribution isn't required at all.

Related: #63232

@SvizelPritula
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I'm not a lawyer, but I can't imagine a judge interpreting this any other way than that no copyright notice is required, just the license text itself.

@aloisklink
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It would be nice for there to at least be something in the LICENSE-MIT file, even if it just says: "Please see the COPYRIGHT file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at http://rust-lang.org/COPYRIGHT". Not seeing a copyright notice in the MIT license is pretty confusing, until you find #43498 (comment)

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A-licensing Area: Compiler licensing A-meta Area: Issues & PRs about the rust-lang/rust repository itself T-core Relevant to the core team, which will review and decide on the PR/issue.
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