[PATCH weston] Update COPYING

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 10:17:21PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> >> I'd be fine to reduce it to the minimal license text, but that doesn't
> >> free us up from needing to check incoming source to make sure it
> >> conforms to the same license. We should really also merge data/COPYING
> >> into the core COPYING.
> >
> > Obviously checking licenses on incoming code is always extremely
> > important. :-)
> >
> > I'm not sure what you're suggesting by reducing it to the minimal
> > license, the file only includes one license statement so appears to be
> > minimal already; I'm not suggesting copyrights *shouldn't* be present,
> > or that any of the existing ones should be removed.  AIUI it's required
> > to have at least one copyright statement, and seems pretty standard to
> > list the major copyright holders (esp. any companies/individuals with a
> > legal interest.)  The main purpose of COPYING, though, is the licensing,
> > to document how the codebase can be shared and reused.
> >
> > You're probably right that merging data/COPYING and COPYING makes
> > sense, but I've seen enough other projects that had subdir-specific
> > licensing gunk that I'm not really worried about it.  I'd be fine
> > either way.
> 
> Yeah, I don't think we're big enough that having separate files makes
> much sense. What I'm mostly just stuck with is the copyright
> statements: at the moment, we list a few but don't go on to list any
> others. I'd suggest an incomplete statement is the worst of both
> worlds: should we maybe just list the applicable licenses with a
> 'Copyright © 2008-2017 multiple authors' and the license text, with a
> note to check the individual files to determine who owns copyright
> over which part?

Yes, that seems like a good approach to me.  That should address all the
points.

I probably would avoid the 'multiple authors' phrasing in the individual
.c files as probably too ambiguous legally, however I've seen plenty of
projects use that in their code.

Bryce