Inaccurate copyright attribution in LICENSE files

[brson]

The copyrights to various parts of Rust are owned by the individual contributors, with the exception that the Mozilla Foundation owns the copyrights to code contributed by moco employees.

The file COPYRIGHT indicates that Rust copyright is owned by 'The Rust Project Developers'. This is probably the most accurate description we have. It doesn't mention the Mozilla Foundation but if you consider the foundation to be a Rust project developer then it still could be accurate.

LICENSE-APACHE contains the template Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner] instead of a proper year and owner. This may be ok to leave as is since COPYRIGHT explicitly says who is using this license.

LICENSE-MIT says

Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Graydon Hoare
Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Mozilla Foundation

This is not correct since it claims all copyright for Rust after 2009 for the Mozilla Foundation.

If we think 'The Rust Project Developers' is the appropriate way to include everybody with a stake, then the Apache file should probably say 2013 The Rust Project Developers and MIT should say

Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Graydon Hoare
Copyright (c) 2009-2013 The Rust Project Developers

[catamorphism]

Nominating this; I'm not sure for what. Production-ready?

[pnkfelix]

visiting for triage, from triage email 2013-07-29.

This seems like it would be really easy to fix, once we actually know what we are supposed to do.

But I'm not inclined to post a pull request until this ticket receives feedback about whether the changes outlined by brson are necessary and/or sufficient.

[brson]

The apache mention is incorrect - it's in a template section about 'how to apply this license to your own work'.

[graydon]

Will consult with Gerv again on this, but I believe we're doing mostly-the-right thing here. Possibly we should remove the author names from LICENSE-MIT.

[brson]

To clarify, since the op was pretty long-winded. The only problem here is that LICENSE-MIT claims the copyright for the Mozilla Foundation.

[graydon]

just a bug, removing milestone/nomination.

[graydon]

Consulted with Gerv, he suggests the notices about authors really don't have much legal effect either way; the SCM and the paper trail establishing authorship is much more robust and the terms of the license do not involve a copyright assignment, so the authors retain legal copyright regardless of what's written here.

[graydon]

(Given that, closing; if it continues to bother you I don't mind if you remove the offending couple lines from LICENSE-MIT)