#17 Normalize / audit copyright notices

[Wesley J. Landaker]

Looking through the copyright notices in our code, we have three issues we ought to address to audit and normalize our notifications.

1. We have a lot of different variations that say the same thing. For example, we have at least the following different named copyright holders that are all virtually equivalent:

Brigham Young University
BYU Configurable Computing Lab

Perhaps this is actually correct, and there are two separate legal entities here, but I assume it's more like a case of more or less specificity.

1. We don't have all of our copyright holders attributed correctly. For example, some of the files that Pete submitted have only a BYU copyright listed, whereas if Pete wrote the original version and BYU modified it, the copyright notice needs to include both parties.

There may be other unlisted copyright holders as well. For example, Sandia National Laboratories specifically dictated open-source licensing, but probably almost certainly holds joint copyright in a lot of material simply by virtue of funding the project).

The easiest way to fix both of these issues in one swift blow is to simply change all of the copyright headers where there are multiple contributors to say something like:

Copyright (C) 2011-2012 PHDL Authors

And then add an AUTHORS text file that lists the names of parties who have contributed code and thus hold joint copyright. This is a good, standard practice, but does mean that if someone wants to find the exact parties who authored an individual file, they have to get the information from another source (e.g. version control). This is almost never an issue in practice.

1. Some of files are licensed as GPL 3 or later, while some of them specify GPL 3 only. We really want everything to be GPL 3 or later, which is the standard way to licensing code under the GPL. Pegging to a specific version of a license is asking for trouble with license compatibility in the future, as we cannot assume that all parties will be available or willing to relicense if need arises several years from now.

I suggest that any party that has licensed something under GPL 3 only change the license grant back to the standard GPL 3 or later offer, which is generally considered best practice use of the GPL. If there is party that is reluctant to do this for some reason, let's discuss it on phdl-devel.