Copyright: Update Authors list

[hoffie]

All source files have an Authors list at the top of the file. This list only contains Volker, most of the times. Other contributors are often missing.

Options:

1. We could add everyone based on git history, but this will quickly get out of hands. src/utils.cpp would show 33 author lines, from a quick glance (git log --format='format:%an' src/util.cpp | sort -u | wc -).
2. Listing only Volker tends to become less valid over time.
3. Dropping authors altogether and listing them somewhere else instead (src/utils.cpp does) would also imply to drop Volker's name, which does not sound nice to me.
4. Maybe a compromise would be Volker Fischer, The Jamulus Development Team and contributors?

• [ ] Headers
• [ ] src/util.cpp:1929 (mentioned by @ann0see in https://github.com/jamulussoftware/jamulus/pull/2331#discussion_r797922651)

The topic was initially raised by @pljones in https://github.com/jamulussoftware/jamulus/pull/2325#discussion_r795429539

[pljones]

Maybe three lines? 2006-2018 Copyright (C) Volker Fischer 2019-2021 Copyright (C) Volker Fischer and contributors 2021-2022 Copyright (C) The Jamulus Development Team and contributors

That leaves it so the updater can catch just the last line easily enough, right?

[hoffie]

@pljones Sounds good to me. So for files which do not carry Volker's copyright, we'd do what you propose but use the existing name instead of Volker's in lines 1 and 2, right?

[pljones]

Oh - I didn't even think of that. I guess we should really say (if you can make this out ;) ): (earliest commit year)[-(last year only the earliest committer committed)] Copyright (C) (earliest committer) [any years <= 2021(earliest committer) "and contributors"] [if updated in 2021 or later "2021-2022 Copyright (C) The Jamulus Development Team and contributors"]

or something... but that's then complicated. There aren't many bits only one person touched that wasn't Volker, of course... If it is only me, then just the last two lines would probably do, with the appropriate replacement.

[hoffie]

Meh, the devil is in the details ;)

or something... but that's then complicated.

Indeed. :(

There aren't many bits only one person touched that wasn't Volker, of course...

If it is only me, then just the last two lines would probably do, with the appropriate replacement.

Volker, you and Stefan Menzel, AronVietti, Simon Tomlinson, according to a quick grep.

I'm not sure how much complexity, resources and manual work or automation we should put into this. I think the goals are:

• Retaining information about the initial author
• Making it correct and maintainable

So, what about just this:

* Copyright (c) 2004-2022 The Jamulus Development team and contributors
* Initial author of this file: Volker Fischer

Compared to the status quo, this adds The Jamulus Development team and contributors to the copyright line (which did not contain anything after the date until now). It also replaces the the Author(s) wording by Initial author of this file to make clear that this is not expected to be updated over time and that the scope is this single file. We could even stop adding this for new code.

There's one potential discrepancy anyway: The existing author list suggests that it is per-file, while for the copyright years we decided to judge that globally and not per-file. The above suggestion avoids that issue somehow.

There's also the issue that the initial author may not matter much anymore if most of the code has been reworked meanwhile in specific cases. But my gut feeling is that there will be little such places. It will also be hard to detect. While git can help will this, it's also easily fooled. E.g. @passing might be considered the author of lots of code by git blame due to the clang-format work... :)

[ann0see]

This is in the "In progress" column on the board. I don't think this is true.

[pljones]

Note that the GNU General Public Licence usage page has an explanation of best to copyright files with multiple authors. We should at least reference the text given there in this issue.