New subject: [xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Remove copyright line in source file headers

12 Sep 2007

Hi,

Maintaining copyright statements in source file headers is a pain.  
The ASF has solved this recently by removing copyright information  
from headers. Their header is now:

/*
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
* or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
* distributed with this work for additional information
* regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
* to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
* "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
* with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
*  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
* software distributed under the License is distributed on an
* "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
* KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
* specific language governing permissions and limitations
* under the License.
*/

The important line is "See the NOTICE file distributed with this work  
for additional information regarding copyright ownership".

I propose that we do the same and have this new boilerplate:

/*
* See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional  
information
* regarding copyright ownership.
*
* This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
* published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of
* the License, or (at your option) any later version.
*
* This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
* Lesser General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
* License along with this software; if not, write to the Free
* Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
* 02110-1301 USA, or see the FSF site: http://www.fsf.org.
*/

And in the NOTICE file we would have:

"
This product includes software developed by XpertNet SARL and  
individual contributors under the following copyright:
Copyright 2004-2007, XpertNet SARL, and individual contributors.
"

WDYT?

I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea if this is valid or not but it  
looks sensible to me.

-Vincent