[TAC] Project Copyright Header Requirements?

[cipherboy]

The LF Edge TAC via @joewxboy recently suggested new copyright header formats:

Second, I’d like to request that each project review the copyright statements on their documentation and other pages. Here’s some guidance Kendall received for us. Open Horizon has adopted the third form “Copyright Contributors to the Open Horizon project” but each project should feel free to use what works best for them from the guidance below.

LF project communities recommend using a more general statement in a form similar to the following (where XYZ is the project’s name):

• Copyright The XYZ Authors.
• Copyright The XYZ Contributors.
• Copyright Contributors to the XYZ project.

These statements are intended to communicate the following:

• the work is copyrighted;
• the contributors of the code licensed it, but retain ownership of their copyrights; and
• it was licensed for distribution as part of the named project.

By using a common format, the project avoids having to maintain lists of names of the authors or copyright holders, years or ranges of years, and variations on the (c) symbol. This aims to minimize the burden on developers and maintainers as well as redistributors of the code, particularly where compliance with the license requires that further distributions retain or reproduce copyright notices.

For code copied into the project repo from a third party source:

• If a file only contains code that originates from a third party source who didn’t contribute it themselves, then the above notices should not be added. Just preserve the existing copyright and license notices as they are.
• If, however, new copyrightable content is added to a pre-existing file from another project, then at that point a copyright notice similar to the one above could be added.

Is there similar guidance from this TAC? Presumably this guidance comes internally from the LF; should this guidance be used?

For context, OpenBao recently moved to the OpenSSF and uses the early style of copyright headers that do not appear to be adopted by any existing OpenSSF projects:

Copyright (c) 2024 OpenBao a Series of LF Projects, LLC

Additionally we use DCO and not a CLA.

Thanks!

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Initially raised by @cipherboy on Slack: https://openssf.slack.com/archives/C01AAV2TTEG/p1748007540722259

[mlieberman85]

GUAC does use some flavor of ^^ based on guidance from LF:

Content under the CC BY 4.0 International license. Code under the MIT license. Copyright © 2024 GUAC a Series of LF Projects, LLC. For web site terms of use, trademark policy and other project policies please see https://lfprojects.org/

[pree]

What's currently still unclear to me is if we should add our copyright to files we modify. As an example after modifying a file should we change:

# Copyright (c) HashiCorp, Inc.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MPL-2.0

to:

# Copyright The OpenBao Contributors
# Copyright (c) HashiCorp, Inc.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MPL-2.0

?

[steiza]

These are good questions, but I think we should defer to LF Legal - @mkdolan can you help advise here?