COPYRIGHT file missing

[ruuda]

The license headers refer to a COPYRIGHT file in the top-level directory of this distribution:

// Copyright 2017 The Rust Project Developers. See the COPYRIGHT
// file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at
// https://rust-lang.org/COPYRIGHT.

No such file exists.

[dhardy]

The version at rust-lang.org appears to be a catch-all copyright notice file for the main Rust project. I guess this happened because rand was split out from the main library. Some bits of this COPYRIGHT file are relevant to this project (ISAAC, general intro), but most are not. I'm not sure though whether we should make our own version? @steveklabnik any advice?

[pitdicker]

A couple of other projects in the nursery, like stdsimd, futures-rs and clippy, don't include a license header at the top of the file at all.

[steveklabnik]

@dhardy I would remove the headers. They're effectively vestigial, and you're not changing the license.

[dhardy]

So we can just say

// Copyright 2017 The Rust Project Developers.

without reference to who these developers are?

[steveklabnik]

This is one of the reasons why these notices are just bad, "The Rust Project Developers" isn't an entity, legally speaking.

[dhardy]

From LICENSE-MIT:

Copyright (c) 2014 The Rust Project Developers

Permission is hereby granted, ..., subject to the following
conditions:

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

...

and another mention in LICENCE-APACHE. So it seems to me that we do need a copyright line, even if the entity is not a legal entity?

[dhardy]

Quoting the APACHE licence, section 4c:

You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;

The text in question is a copyright notice of a sort it seems to me, though the URL mentioned does nothing any more.

Theoretically it would make sense to do something in line with this, though header notices in this redistribution appears to contradict the licence. The Rust project itself also hasn't removed this notice.

Since the issue is apparently not particularly important to us, why don't we:

1. add a simple COPYRIGHT file at the top level, explaining that authors can be found from the commit history
2. simplify notices on new files (and potentially recently added ones) to just the following:

   // Copyright 2017 The Rand Project Developers.