troyf
December 1, 2024, 3:40am
1
Category: License
In the file LICENSE-MIT , to which copyright does line 11 refer? Maybe any changes to licenses should go through legal?
Troy.
1 Like
Do you mean that the first line from the template below is missing?
Copyright Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the…
This kind of questions might be best suited for IRLO .
scimas
December 1, 2024, 7:07am
3
rust-lang:master ← joshtriplett:fix-notices
opened 11:49PM - 26 Jul 17 UTC
(As discussed with @aturon and @est31. CC @rust-lang/core.)
Currently, rust-l… ang/rust includes notices that say things like
```
The Rust Project is copyright 2010, The Rust Project
Developers.
```
or
```
Copyright (c) 2010 The Rust Project Developers
```
or
```
// Copyright 2017 The Rust Project Developers. See the COPYRIGHT
// file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at
// http://rust-lang.org/COPYRIGHT.
```
These notices aren't accurate. "Copyright YYYY Some Name" has a specific legal meaning, and "The Rust Project Developers" isn't a legal entity. In practice, the actual legal structure is that all Rust contributors retain their copyrights when contributing to Rust, and just license them under MIT/Apache-2.0. Our legal notices should reflect that.
This came up because of RFC 2044, which proposed fixing this for the RFC repository. That effort started out by copying the rust-lang/rust notices, propagating this issue.
Based on discussion with @aturon, the two of us propose the following:
- Delete the per-file notices entirely, for any files licensed under the standard terms. (Keep notices for anything that's *not* MIT/Apache-2.0.)
- An alternative to that would be to just delete the first paragraph of the standard notice, and keep the second paragraph that points to the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses.
- Delete the first paragraph of LICENSE-MIT (the inaccurate pseudo-copyright line), leaving only the text of the MIT license.
- Edit the COPYRIGHT file to more accurately describe the situation (changing the pseudo-copyright line immediately under "longer version", and editing the text that starts with "additional copyright may be ...", to just always state that copyrights are retained by the Rust contributors, and licensed under MIT/Apache-2.0 (with the exceptions to that explicitly noted in that file).
If @rust-lang/core is fine with this proposal, I'd be happy to provide a pull request with the proposed fixes.
That's the PR that removed the copyright line. You might find the discussion and links from there helpful.
2 Likes
troyf
December 15, 2024, 1:29am
4
I'm just saying that the license does not make sense and may now be invalid. Line 11 states: "The above copyright notice" shall be included in all copies.
There is now no "above copyright notice". It was deleted, and the reference to it was not removed.
Further, I wonder, if the copyright notice is no longer required for copies, how can the license be enforced?
(I did read the PR discussion)
Troy.