Hi Mark, On Wed, 2013-05-01 at 14:57 -0700, Mark Washenberger wrote:

Hi folks,

I was looking into the ASL-2.0, and chanced across the fact that in Apache projects, they require that source files only have the License Header, and may not have any copyright notices [1]. It occurred to me that we waste a fair amount of time on copyrights in license headers, and it would be nice not to have to do that anymore.

Like Monty said, I'd like to hear more about why these are seen as a time sink.

I also noticed a previous conversation [2] on this subject. I have not found any policy that actually requires us to include copyrights with each source file license header.

Feel free to suggest that this is more trouble than it is worth, but I'd like to propose that we discourage new contributions from including copyright attribution, and provide a process to work with the various parties we have to remove the copyrights from existing files.

I don't have a massively strong opinion on this and I'd never really considered the possibility of not having copyright headers, but my first thought is that I like that we have them. I like that "ownership" of the work is distributed and it's nice to be able to see how that ownership is distributed through the code base. In any case, I think it's too late for us to effectively make a change in like this successfully and not worth the hassle. Cheers, Mark.