Copyright Notices in Open Source Projects¶
A streamlined approach to your project’s copyright notices makes compliance easier for everyone.
Key takeaways and best practices¶
For your projects, use a copyright notice format like
Copyright The XYZ AuthorsorCopyright Contributors to the XYZ project.Including years, names of copyright holders, and copyright symbols can be unproductive.
Retain–and do not modify–pre-existing copyright notices and those corresponding to any third party’s code.
Overview¶
Most code contributed to open source projects is copyrighted. Under the intellectual property policies used by the LF’s projects, the contributors retain ownership of those copyrights (and grant rights under an OSI-approved license to the project and its users).
Because the code is copyrighted, some contributors assume that the project requires a formal copyright notice statement to be included in the code. Some may believe that they are giving up ownership of their copyrights if they don’t include details like their name, a range of dates and years, and a C-in-a-circle symbol that doesn’t even exist on their keyboard.
In fact, formal copyright notices have not been required to be included on copyrighted content for decades. Using a notice in a particular format can have some effects under applicable law. But in the context contributions to open source projects, there is likely little benefit to following these formalities–and doing so can cause headaches for maintainers and downstream users. Because of this, the LF recommends that its projects consider using the streamlined format described below.
Details¶
In place of a formal notice for each copyright holder, many 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.
Caveats¶
Projects using a traditional notice format¶
Not all Linux Foundation project communities follow these practices. For historical reasons or other preferences, some projects have used and continue to use a more traditional copyright notice format including names of copyright holders, ranges of years, and / or the (c) or © symbol.
In general, to minimize friction when contributing, you will likely want to mirror the practices of the particular project community unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.
Code from third parties¶
Where code is copied from a third party source, do not remove or modify someone else’s copyright notice, unless they have expressly (in writing) permitted you to do so. This includes third parties’ notices in pre-existing code.
If a file only contains code that originates from a third party source who didn’t contribute it themselves, then you would not want to add the notices recommended above. (In a similar vein, you wouldn’t add a notice identifying you as the copyright holder either, if you didn’t own it.) Just preserve the existing copyright and license notices as they are.
If, however, you add copyrightable content to a pre-existing file from another project, then at that point you could add a copyright notice similar to the one recommended above–while of course retaining existing notices.
Resources¶
The original Linux Foundation blog post
Related guidance from Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
