Include copyright and license header help in the Guide to the Legal Documentation
Submitted by Wayne Beaton @wbeaton
Link to original bug (#520109)
Description
Copyright headers are part of the legal documentation. We should include them in the documentation along with everything else.
We'll use this opportunity to tweak our guidance. Note that we're not going to require wholesale changes to any existing headers. Rather this is for new content or for projects that are otherwise engaged in changing headers (e.g. while updating to the EPL-2.0).
Let's avoid including the actual comment framing in the discussion. e.g.
-- Copyright (c) 2017 ACME Loo, and others
This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0 which accompanies this distribution, and is available at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-1.0
The content, embedded in an actual comment (e.g. framed top, left, and bottom with a bar of stars) may be presented as an example.
Note the inclusion of the SPDX-License-Identifier tag.
We'll use this opportunity to introduce an alternative header style:
-- Copyright (c) 2017 Contributors to the Eclipse Foundation
See the NOTICE file(s) distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the EPL-1.0 which accompanies this distribution and is available at https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-v10.html.
SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-1.0
With this style, the project team is obligated to provide a list of copyright holders in a notices file.
I have some ideas for how we might help project teams automate this.