Re: Making copyright holders easier to parse

From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-07-27 09:02:40

On 7/27/19 4:36 AM, Giovanni Mascellani via Boost wrote:
> 
>> /*
>>   *          Copyright Andrey Semashev 2007 - 2015.
>>   * Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
>>   *    (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>>   *          http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>>   */
> 
> I might change this to:
> 
>> /*
>>   * Copyright: 2007-2015 Andrey Semashev
>>   * License: Boost Software License, Version 1.0
>>   * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>>   * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>>   */
> 
> File libs/atomic/include/boost/atomic/fences.hpp has:
> 
>> /*
>>   * Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
>>   * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>>   * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>>   *
>>   * Copyright (c) 2011 Helge Bahmann
>>   * Copyright (c) 2013 Tim Blechmann
>>   * Copyright (c) 2014 Andrey Semashev
>>   */
> 
> I might change this to:
> 
>> /*
>>   * Copyright: 2011 Helge Bahmann
>>   * Copyright: 2013 Tim Blechmann
>>   * Copyright: 2014 Andrey Semashev
>>   * License: Boost Software License, Version 1.0
>>   * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>>   * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>>   */
> 
> I hope these examples illustrate my intention. I think that having more
> easily parsable copyright holders could be useful for Debian, for Boost
> and for Boost adopters which should properly care about the licensing of
> the libraries they use.

I'd prefer if the license headers were also easily readable by human 
users, since it is humans these headers are intended for in the first 
place. In particular, keep the copyright holders visually separate from 
the license e.g. by an empty line. I'm not very keen on using colon to 
introduce a-la-HTTP headers, but that might be ok if everyone agrees. 
Are we sure that the "Distributed under" part has no legal significance?

Also, we have an "inspect" tool that checks for the license header 
presence. Make sure that the modified headers satisfy that tool.

Also, it might be a good time to update license URLs to https.